My Portal Project

How many Microsoft developers does it take fix a light bulb? None, they just declare darkness to be the new standard. <rant=enabled >

I mentioned in a previous post that I was having some fun with the new AJAX.NET toolkit extensions, but that was with a stand-alone ASP.NET project. While coming back into the Sharepoint project we were reminded of this old joke. While the web development world is embracing design standards and making the best of them, there are still developers at Microsoft who seem to believe in the “do as I say, not as I do” mantra.

We were using the new TabContainer toolkit extension. When we were testing our webparts in a local test page, which by default in Visual Studio 2005 is XHTML compliant, our tabcontainers work fine. When we placed the webparts into the Sharepoint environment, the bottom 8px of the tab text was hidden / cut off (of course it looked fine in Firefox).

We eventually dug into the issue with Firebug and some googling to find out that the team that created the tab container does not support pages in Quirks mode. Huh?! Who is using quirks mode in the .NET world? The Sharepoint team is. The default master page of a Sharepoint site uses quirks mode, with no doctype. So their flagship collaboration product is using 1997 display techniques. We are left to wonder with how many of these new toolkit extensions are not going to work in Sharepoint 2007.

One might guess that Microsoft had to do this to get their Sharepoint pages to work with all their standards non-compliant versions of Internet Explorer.

For the record, here is the hack to fix it

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Web Development, ASP.NET. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.