I was reading this interesting (and bravely-titled) post on cross-browser testing earlier and scrolling down this memory-jogging infographic detailing the history of modern web browsers when I got to the bottom where Chrome came into existence and thought back to that day in early September 2008 when Chrome was first leaked then announced and the internet went wild. Now where was I that day?

I was deep inside the heart of Microsoft UK. And the reaction was priceless.

This is an open letter to the IEEE, the organisation that produces standards for a wide range of engineering and technical formats. It is regarding a rather unfortunate encounter I had with their website a few nights ago.

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am writing to you regarding the IEEE website, http://ieee.org.

Last night I decided I would investigate signing up as a student member of the IEEE. I have been meaning to do so for a number of years, and as I am now three fifths of the way through my Robotics degree, I thought it would prove useful to me. Unfortunately, I was unable to sign up as a member, as I was not able to even sign up for an account on your site. The following details explain the numerous difficulties I had.

First of all, your sign-up form makes significant and unreasonable demands on the user. In the first sign-up page alone, you must enter the date in a extremely specific format – I did not realise that dropdown boxes had gone out of fashion so quickly. The additional requirement of an uppercase username is contrary to every single other sign-up form on the web. Additionally, when you submit a form with a non-uppercase username, it goes to an error page which in no way allows you to retrieve the form values you had previously entered; this is supremely frustrating. So if I fill the form in correctly with the exception of one character in the Username field which happens to not be uppercase, I am forced to fill in the while form again (from the beginning) as the provided “Back” button, the browser back button, and pressing backspace to skip back a page all take me back to the very first “start” page of the form. Pressing return in the form is also not linked to the submit button, which is also counter to just about every other form on the web and goes against accessibility guidelines.

If we manage to get all of the first page right at one time, we are taken to the address page. Once again, if we get one single part of this page wrong, we are taken to the error page and given no way of going back to retrieve the previously entered information. This means we don’t lose just the address entered – it means the loss of the first page of information too, so it is required to literally start at the beginning again. On this second page, the arbitrary date format and return key not working problems once again manifest themselves. I’m afraid I can’t comment on subsequent pages, as I got entirely frustrated with the extremely slow progress at what should be a rapid and simple task and quit to write you this e-mail.

Please don’t just give me your cross-browser limitations “disclaimer” you warn the user with before commencing the form. It is a form – that is all. There are innumerable forms successfully implemented on the web that work with any browser, simply because they have been designed and thought about and tested in a way that makes them so. I would be willing to wager that many of the IEEE’s members are more than capable of building a simple form that works in all browsers that you may reasonably expect it to.

For an organisation such as your own to not be able to fulfil a simple form-filling activity on the web is, quite frankly, an embarrassment. I hope this feedback will be passed to the section of your organisation – or, as the case may be, the contractor – responsible for this poor excuse for a website, and that I may at some point be able to obtain membership.

Chris Alexander.

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I had high hopes for IE 9.

In fact, I was quite looking forward to it. The Platform Previews worked very well, and I was pleased that HTML 5 was finally at the forefront of the platform. Hardware acceleration was nice, the video situation wasn’t great but I was prepared to let it slide, and everything seemed to be going better than expected.

Then the Beta landed. The user interface was something unexpected! Nice minimalist header, single box at the top, not too many buttons and some really nice features integrated with Windows 7. Now you could set up jump lists, make it so a tab can be pinned to the taskbar, and customise the theme of the browser when that pinned link is opened. You can tie in to Jump Lists; add custom buttons to the previews that popup from the taskbar; and a few other nifty little features.

But that’s where the cool stops. Because despite Microsoft finally jumping on the standards bandwagon, providing standard APIs and implementations we might be able to rely on, I was then shown the code which performs all of the “cool” functionality I mentioned earlier. Abused Meta tags. Proprietary JavaScript APIs. Recommendations for using non-standard icon sizes.

It seems all of this stuff has been implemented in the most hacky way possible. Which is a nightmare. Out goes cross-browser compliance, out goes standard JavaScript APIs – Microsoft have invented their own little language extension and are going to force it on everybody. It reminds me of the “OpenXML format is 100% free and open”, “So what does this tag contain, which is defined in the spec as ‘Contains a blob of binary data used for rendering a OneNote snippet’ with no more information” debate when Office 2007 and OpenXML all happened.

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Archive;action-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk/archive.aspx;icon-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk//themes/arthemia/images/favicon.ico" />

That is just not on.

So my hope would have been that Microsoft used something more sensible, for example the HTML 5 Application Manifest for which this kind of thing was designed rather than the archaic and frankly incorrect abuse of Meta tags. I am also yet to see mention of a way to detect whether the browser supports the JavaScript calls (which are also disgustingly named) or not. Mmm, compliant. Not.

That’s it, I’m fed up – I’m calling out Flipboard for blatantly disregarding ownership of content, costing me money without providing a return, and reducing my advertising revenues.

Now don’t get me wrong, I only make a few quid out of my website, so this is not a massive problem to me (let’s face it, I have a job); but scale this up and it basically turns into robbery. It’s what got Google in a big stack of lawsuits over Google News, and just because you’ve got some “cool app” for the iPad doesn’t mean you can just go treading on people’s rights and doing what you please.

I absolutely adore writing JavaScript. Like many things with many people, I’m not very good at it and probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it, but I just can’t get enough of doing it.

I was fortunate enough to spend about half of the past few days at work (while not testing a massive number of bug fixes) writing a big pile of JavaScript. You may have seen me present the TweetMeme Chrome Extension a few weeks ago now at the Chrome developer event in London.

I’ve been taking the opportunity to brush up on my JavaScript knowledge and techniques. One thing I have discovered is that building robust, reliable, bug-free JavaScript is a lot more difficult than in a lot of other languages.