…. or, misapplied CSS causes corporate scuffle.
About two weeks ago, users of Opera 7 noticed that the MSN home page looked screwy in Opera, but appeared normally in all other browsers. Opera’s CTO (who is also one of the authors of the W3C‘s CSS specs) did a little digging and found the cause – apparent sabotage by Microsoft.
Today, in retaliation, Opera released a Swedish Chef browser that transforms the text of the MSN home page into Swedish-Chef-speak. (“bork bork bork!”)
This is all extremely funny, but as some Slashdot readers have pointed out, the MSN folks may not have been acting maliciously. Opera 6, it turns out, renders unordered lists by indenting them 30 pixels more than other browsers. Therefore, the margin: …-30px; that caused the page to look funny was probably someone’s misguided attempt to work around Opera’s rendering bug. Since Opera 7 renders lists the same way IE and Mozilla do, the Opera-specific “fix” broke the page in version 7. However, Opera has a screenshot to back up their assertion that Opera 6 worked just fine without MSN‘s inept “fix.”
In any case, I’m sad that the Bork Edition is Windows-only. However misguided both parties were, the “solution” is absolutely priceless.
(Thanks to John for demonstrating the Bork Edition for me this morning!)
