Bryan has a friend that is in med school, and the other night he needed to take an online, open book test. Bryan mentioned that in order for his friend to take this test that it had to be taken on a Windows PC with Internet Explorer. That got me to thinkin:

I am no fool and I fully realize, that no matter how much I rant and rave about how great Linux is, or that no matter how mac fans claim their OS is the best...(I am really diggin\' it)...the fact of the matter is that Microsoft still rules the world as we know it. However, that being said, I wondered for a moment that if the sole reason for this M$ only requirement was due to lazy programming. Personally I\'d like to think that is the case. I suppose it would make my job easier if there were only one OS and one browser to ever worry about, but I shudder to even imagine living in that world, if for no other reason than, \"I like choice.\"

It\'s easy to sit down an write a web app when you only have one \"platform\" to worry about. The minute you introduce variety, a programmers job gets to be a bit more complicated. However, having said that, I enjoy the fact that what I write isn\'t labelled as \"Internet Explorer\" only. Alot of what we do at our job is for clients that have M$ as a standard and that would allow us some luxuries when it comes to certain solutions, especially where javascript is concerned. Alas, being the full on geeks that we are, or \"craftsmen\" as one of our fearless leader\'s calls us, we take the extra pain and care to ensure that our apps will behave the same and look damn near identical no matter what OS or browser you use...(with maybe the exception of Opera and Lynx of course). Firefox, Safari, IE 4 and on, our apps pretty much all behave well and as expected. Call me a perfectionist, but that is the world I love to work in. Not because it makes me think, \"damn we\'re good\" but because we can \"CHOOSE\" to be that way.