March 9, 2004, 3:00 PM ET
IE hack could benefit from centralization
Dean Edwards' IE7 is a hot topic on Web-development sites lately. A brilliant hack, it lets Web authors paste a single line of code into their HTML pages in order to "enable" certain advanced CSS and JavaScript functionality in Internet Explorer -- the browser that's fallen far behind Mozilla and Opera in compliance with new markup and scripting standards.
The single drawback of IE7 is its size. Taking advantage of it requires users to download a 10 KB file. So here's an idea: Why couldn't a trusted central authority -- mozilla.org or webstandards.org, for instance -- host the One True Version of this file, and ask Web developers to link to it? That way, users' computers would cache the file the first time it was downloaded.
