Re: IE6 Idiosyncrasies

The one IE 6 idiosyncrasy that caused us the most grief was actually its
built-in privacy engine.  It adopts the P3P privacy policy standard
established by W3C, and let me tell you this:  they claim establishing a P3P
privacy policy is voluntary...but only if you want some of your potential
customers to be unable to order off your online store because it blocks
cookies under certain conditions.

We found that, unless we initiated a P3P privacy policy, some of our own
cookies (not true third-party ones) were being blocked by IE 6.  Why?
Because our secure server resides on a domain other than what our main site
is, and we embed them both using frames.

The whole "how and why" of setting up a P3P privacy is needlessly
convoluted:   you have to either know exactly what the XML tags are to build
your own XML-based privacy policy, compact privacy policy (which has to be
installed in the HTTP headers of your server) and a "human readable" privacy
file, all located in folder off your web server's root named "W3C".

There are software available to help you generate these files, but most of
them require a fee.  The only one that doesn't is IBM's P3P editor.  The
whole process --especially if it ends up costing you money to produce--
smacks of extortion on the part of Microsoft.

Believe me:  eventually IE 6's privacy features will cause you the biggest
headache.  For more info on this, I urge you and everyone to look at:
http://www.w3.org/P3P/

In there you'll find links to sites that offer P3P editing software, as well
as example sites of those who have privacy policies installed.    The
biggest lifesaver for us was the IBM P3P editor --I highly recommend it.

So what sites have privacy policies installed?  If you go to any site in IE
6, go to "VIEW" and then "PRIVACY REPORT" and then click one of the cookies
listed so that it is highlighted.  Next, click on the "SUMMARY" button.  You
will either see a privacy report loaded in that window, or an error that
says, "no report found for this site."  Use the W3.org site as an example,
since it definitely has a privacy report.  Now go to any non-Microsoft,
major site and chances are you won't see a report there.

HTH,
Mike


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gosse, Amy" <AGosse(at)chw.org>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 4:48 PM
Subject: IE6 Idiosyncrasies


> Hello All,
>
> We're about to switch to IE6 as our corporate browser.  We know how IE6 no
> longer defaults "left" for alignment in table columns, etc., preferring
> instead to use
> "center" as the default.  In the interest of keeping file sizes small, and
> for faster coding, we didn't code the alignments for most of our Intranet
> pages.  Now they're all nicely centered in IE6, unfortunately that's not
how
> we wanted them to look.  Are there other IE6 idiosyncrasies like this, and
> if so, is there any place where these have been documented?
>
> Thanks!
> Amy
>
>

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