Abscissa

The problem is, PHP makes it far too easy to write insecure code. That's not something that's ever going to get fixed in PHP.

Heheh, ok, even I gotta upvote that :)

As if OpenID needed more support...

http://marcoslot.net/apps/openid/

(Not that PHP itself is known for security either.)

It would be a lot easier to take Ubuntu seriously if it didn't insist on using that goofy naming scheme. (Meh, at least it's alphabetical though. *rolls eyes at OSX*)

As much as I like this column, I've always hated the *cough* word "fugly". Either use "Fucking Ugly" or just simply "Ugly" (Or hell, even "F*ing Ugly" if you insist on trying to marry swearing with PC-ness). But none of this making up redundant words nonsense.

Also, may I take this opportunity to point out that I find it quite odd that this article mentions that it's good to be able to customize one's computer, and yet, the text in these comment-entry fields are completely unreadable for people who, like me, have customized their system to use light-on-dark, thus forcing them to, as I'm doing now, write their comments in something sensible, like notepad, and then copy-paste them into this "Fugly" comment box. Talk about pots calling kettles black.

I know this is just nitpicking, but..isn't checkers typically red vs black, not red vs. white? Not that it really matters, of course.

I'm not so sure I'd consider Flash and JavaScript things that make the web nice to use (ok, coming from me, that's an understatement). And Java rarely used on the web these days (Of course, I'm just referring to client-side here.).

I was going to make a crack about how crappy Acrobat Reader 7+ has always been and then mention my use of FoxIt. But I see I've been beaten to it by three other people. Normally that sort of thing would be mildly frustrating, but in this case it brings a big smile to my face :)

The trendy use of "crazy" as an adverb really needs to stop.

"What do you make of the list? What does it say about the state of Internet Explorer and web standards?"

Speaking as a programmer, I'd have to say "It depends, I'd have to look into the details of what the specific technical problem is with IE and Google, or with IE and the other sites." It really could go either way. You just can't say "Combination X and Y messes up, therefore it must be X's fault.", regardless of what X is and what Y is. We could speculate all we want about whether it's IE8's fault, the web site's fault, or something else, but it's all nothing more than just that, speculation, unless we look at the technical details of what's going on. And at the moment, that's not something I can really comment on, I'd have to go look into it. (I try to avoid web dev whenever possible.)

As far as the list being really big, well yea, of course, that's only natural. If IE8 has bad standards support, then ok, that can manifest itself as a high incompatibility rate. But if IE8 really does have improved standards support, then that is still going to result in a high incompatibility rate as well, in part because sites haven't had a chance to update their pages to not rely on the old bad behaviors. So all in all, it doesn't necessarily mean *anything*.