But I think we all know this already. I was perusing an article entitled On having layout, and I am appalled by absurd inner workings of IE. Man, screw this madness. Designers should design solely for pure CSS and XHTML. There is a quote in there that I find incredibly disturbing—is this just something that folks who design for IE subscribe to, or is this philosophy applicable to software engineers who design Windows software?

Software-bugs are the result of human errors and lack of completeness and logic during the creation-process. It’s a fundamental human shortcoming, for which a lasting cure is yet to be found. Any attempts to correct buggy software without recreating it from scratch, will inevitably lead to even more and more complex bugs finding their way into the software, because of the same human shortcomings.

All software that rely on other software — including Operating Systems (of course), will also rely on its bugs. Thus we get a cascade of bugs from all involved bits of software, which makes even the thought of finding bug-free software completely absurd.

While I agree that there will never be such a thing as bug-free software, I think it is dreadful to purposefully code relying on bugs. In a world where open APIs (if not outright open source) are available, there’s no reason to stand for such madness. If you are a developer and the expected behavior fails to match the spec, you should stand up and demand a fix. I think it’s sad that people who are dependent on MS software simply accept the trash they are given.