Unfortunately, this has the potential to be a very incorrect statement. The more you do things with the aim of making money (I know, everyone needs rent) the more unsuccessful you will prove to be at it. Trust me, I’ve been there and I’ve seen other’s go there.

Marty’s passion and resultant focus is what makes him so successful. Marty is young (sorry Marty, I’m not sure how much you like or dislike your age being pointed out like that). We are very nearly the same age, and he is MY professor which, for me, is both embarassing and inspiring.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s taken more than one class with him. He’s damned effective and I can’t see his success coming to an end any time soon.
I don’t think he got to where he is today by following the herd. To the contrary, he 1)is educated about what he’s talking about and 2)acts on what he recognizes as needing positive change. If he’s willing to share that model of success with you – a model that brings positive change to your industry and doesn’t leave you stranded at the behest of a bully making all the rules – I think it could quite possibly be one of the best business decisions you’ve ever made (and make you a whole lot more than just rent).

I say ‘you,’ because, well, CS is not my industry. I chose to leave the world of technology to pursue another passion… I’ll be reading books for a living… we’ll see how much rent that makes me

PS: incase this post is construed as ass-kissing for a grade-raise, you will see I have not used my real name, nor my school email address XD
also, posted using IE! HAHA!

It’s true that I was looking at this discussion more from the end user perspective, and I do think that’s relevant, because your students’ future clients could be IE users either by their own laziness or by force from a corporate IT department. Alternate browser use is growing, but my stats show that on the site I support, the top browser used is still IE. And with so many enterprise applications making the jump to being web-based, seems to me like that’s a lot of jobs.

But maybe I read this post wrong. I originally interpreted as you saying that you would not teach your students to develop so that sites work in IE. But now I see: “As an educator, I don’t want to teach my students a bunch of hacks and workarounds so that their pages work in a web browser that willingly goes out of its way to break things for everybody else.” So you don’t WANT to, or you don’t? I am not sure.

I got my info about the browser from your syllabus. “The recommended software for the course is the Firefox web browser (with Firebug add-on), and the TextPad (Windows) or Smultron (Mac) text editor. The course web site has links to download this software.” But I don’t think Firefox is so great any more.

Keep fighting the good fight, though.

The right way to do things is to code to standards, not hack for IE. If people do this consistently, Microsoft will be the one left behind and will be forced to play by the rules.

Besides, I’m not telling anyone they can’t tailor their web site to look nice in IE. I’m just saying that I refuse to teach that in my 190M course, since it’s a waste of time IMO; and that if they want to learn this, they’ll have to learn it themselves. I do provide links to learn such things in my 190M materials.

I was looking at your course website and notice you focus a lot on Firefox, which I liked for a long time, but sort of sucks now too. What about Chrome? I’ve been using it exclusively and I really like it.

FYI, you might appreciate this video (PG-13): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrfpnbGXL70