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If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

devblogs.microsoft.com

11–20 of 356 posts

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#11
post #5

Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors. I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.

What did you think we learned?

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#12
post #5

Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors. I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.

Browsers still follow that strategy. The effort to replace it with strict validation (XHTML) failed. What succeeded instead was HTML5, which went back and explicitly defined how every possible invalid sequence should be interpreted, so that browsers would at least be consistent about it.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#13
post #9
post #5

Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors. I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.

"We" did. Microsoft didn't. Not unexpected.

Is this part of a fan fiction where MS isn't amazing at legacy compatibility?

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#14

I understand the logic here, and I'm aware Microsoft has a large number of convoluted backward-compatibility requirements, but this seems like drinking to solve your problems and just putting off the inevitable hangover. To be clear: what you're doing here is lying to the user and the developer. Maybe that's justified in isolation, but now this lie is one more bit of "hidden state" you have to keep track of in furthe…

To be fair, sometimes you get "Oops, an error occurred, LOL!"

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#16
post #4

"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to." This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise

The alternative is that the app fails to run at all. Doesn't seem like satire to me.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#17
post #4

"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to." This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise

No, this is a guy who has been one of the architects of Windows for more than 30 years giving you hints about how they achieved their reputation for amazing backwards compatibility. He really, really knows what he's talking about.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#18

I understand the logic here, and I'm aware Microsoft has a large number of convoluted backward-compatibility requirements, but this seems like drinking to solve your problems and just putting off the inevitable hangover. To be clear: what you're doing here is lying to the user and the developer. Maybe that's justified in isolation, but now this lie is one more bit of "hidden state" you have to keep track of in furthe…

As far as alternatives to what the article suggested go, I think the ideal solution would be to have a compile-time error, so the developers never even get as far as having their printing code try to run on the Xbox. And since it's a compile-time error, there doesn't need to be any kind of runtime error handling or cost either.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#19
post #4

"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to." This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise

What do you suggest as an alternative?

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#20
post #10

People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.

Umm but you can’t find a current version of Word that actually does that. Try it sometime.
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