Those words, uttered by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, in the role as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, symbolized how it felt for me to have do develop things for Netscape 4. Luckily, Netscape has been declared dead now.

However, I read an interesting post which claimed that Internet Explorer has become the new Netscape 4 for us developers (original post found here).
I think that statement is a bit too harsh, but Internet Explorer
absolutely poses the biggest challenge in every day developing.

The thing that bothers me, though, is when pro-IE developers say things like: “So what’s so special about Firefox/Safari/[insert name of more competent browser here]? What does it have that IE doesn’t?”
It is that kind of attitude that scares me, that people are able to get
along in their professional life as developers without even knowing
about all the things Internet Explorer is missing, the far superior CSS
support (amongst other things) in other browsers and so on.

Well, I advise those people to take a look at Eric Meyer‘s css/edge site (of course, the examples here need that you use a competent web browser).

One of the things I miss the most in Internet Explorer’s CSS support is attribute selectors.
How about adding a look for all input text fields, without using classes,
and without affecting radio buttons, checkboxes, submit buttons etc.
Impossible, you say! Nope. Just code it like this:

input[type=”text”]{
width:300px;
background:#F00;
}

Ah, amazing, isn’t it? Eric Meyer wrote an article in three pieces about this in August 2000, part 1, part 2 and part 3. I recommend you to read these, especially the “box of possibilities”, as I’d like to call it, at the end of part 3.

Microsoft Watch has also got some interesting rumours about what we might expext in IE 7.