Every few months I have a look at my site with Internet Explorer. I don't care if it doesn't work great, but occasionally I find that it works absolutely awful. I'm always amazed at how badly it can screw up the simplest things. Syntax Error in line 2. Great. Except this is in the Javascript editor. Line 2 of what file? There are a few hundred... And what kind of syntax error? What syntax threw the error? It would be nice to be able to grep for something so I could fix it.

Reminds me of AIX. Error 46392. You have to call your IBM sales rep because mortals weren't allowed to know what error number 46392 means. The sales droid makes the problem clear as mud. "It's a DXJ fault in the I/O:grip:204 system. You'll need to fix your code". Right. After a few weeks and a few hundred phone calls an IBM internal engineer finally sheepishly admits - "It's a known bug. We're working on it. You can apply patch #24573294.3 but that breaks the event scheduler. You're better off waiting for the next release.". 

Anyway, back to MSIE. I then try to view an RSS feed as text/plain. Hmmm. IE doesn't like text files. OK, view it as application/rss+xml. Now it gives me 'unknown type'. OK, now I see. Even though I specify what type of file it is in the HTTP header, it can't handle it, because the file has no extension. It's just a data stream. Why does it have to be a file with an extension? I thought file extensions were dead.

Not at Microsoft...

I previously turned off drop shadows for IE because it doesn't support transparent PNG files and GIFs are just too ugly. Turns out it does support transparent PNG - by applying an HTML input filter as a CSS style declaration. Huh? Here's how... 

  <div id="something" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='path/to/file.png', sizingMethod='scale');"></div>

Didja' get that? You don't use an img tag at all to put an image into a web page. And you have to know in advance what kind of image it is. Parse the file to determine if it has transparency enabled. Last time I saw syntax that was this ugly was when I tried to make AIX (which incidentally is IBM's old Unix-like OS) dynamically load a shared library.

If it's any consolation, IBM isn't trying to push AIX anymore. Nobody wanted it because it was too difficult to work with.

IBM is a Linux shop now.