Toss the Bath Water and the Baby

Bill Bill de hÓra picks up on the broken-ness of the Flash VM's ability or lack thereof to expose headers to the fault callback. He also pulls in to hell with bad web clients. As I read that, I'm convinced that Flex is actually my escape hatch from browser insanity. I'm heads down in CSS Mastery at the moment trying to make my nav bar behave sanely across browsers for some non-profit work I'm doing. It's sick the amount of work I'm doing to make sure A is left of B in IE 5.5 on Mac *and* IE 7 on XP x64. Comparatively, the time spent doing the same thing in Flex would have been 1/10th the effort if that. So, I actually agree with Bill on this, we should get rid of bad clients, those bad citizens of the web that break and hurt our beloved web.

That's right, we need to toss out the browser all together. Em, or even better, let's actually make our browsers behave as good citizens in the HTTP multiverse that is bearing-down on us like a freight-train made of UTF-8 printable characters (and none of those binary, non-readable ones either thank you very much). As an open message to FF, IE, OP, KQ, etc., I want DELETE. I want access to headers in my XHRs, I want full control. You want to hide it from me, the ignoramus developer because I'm not ready? Ok, wget, here I come!