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[MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background)

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 17, 2009, 12:53 AM

Post #1 of 29 (2589 views)
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[MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background)

Hello everyone,

I'm totally new to this list, so please pardon me if it's the wrong
place to discuss my idea and please point me to a more suitable list.

Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a
Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a
table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct
color which makes formula images look ugly. Sorry, the article is in
Russian and I didn't find an English counterpart to demonstrate the
issue, but by looking at the table you should get the idea.

My first thought was "What if we could eliminate that white background
in favor of alpha channel?" Then it will look equally well no matter
what background it is put.

As I have some experience with PNG images and alpha channel stuff,
I've wrote this simple half-page program (attached) in C++ to
transform any grayscale PNG image containing black-on-white text to
image with alpha channel added, so it display nicely on any background
(except black :). The program uses PNG++, a C++ wrapper library[2]
around libpng.

A mockup of what it'll look like if we replace currently used formula
image in the table header, with an image transformed by my program is
attached as well. I think that visual improvement is immediately
obvious.

Now, thanks for your patience if you read till here. :) I'd like to
know if there any drawbacks[3] to the proposed approach? Was it by
design that white background is preserved, if so why and can this be
refined somehow?

--
Regards,
Alex

[1] http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F
Note: scroll down one page to see the table

[2] http://www.nongnu.org/pngpp/

[3] It needs to be tested with IE6, as it is well known for problems
with transparent PNGs.

Attachments:

latex-alpha-mockup.png (5.44 KB)

Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Nov 17, 2009, 7:11 AM

Post #2 of 29 (2507 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:53 AM, Alexander Shulgin
<alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a
> Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a
> table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct
> color which makes formula images look ugly.

See bug:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8

As far as I know, the only thing actually blocking us from doing this
was something like IE5 on Mac printing transparent images with black
backgrounds. That's probably not relevant anymore. We're still stuck
with the fact that IE6 doesn't support alpha channels, though -- we
could make the fully-transparent parts of the background transparent,
but I don't see how we could avoid aliasing effects on sane browsers
without making things look extremely ugly on IE6.

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marco at harddisk

Nov 17, 2009, 7:43 AM

Post #3 of 29 (2517 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail<Simetrical%2Bwikilist [at] gmail>
> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:53 AM, Alexander Shulgin
> <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> > Today, while reading my morning load of news I've come across a
> > Wikipedia article[1] with some embedded LaTeX formulae, used within a
> > table. The table header on that page has background of a distinct
> > color which makes formula images look ugly.
>
> See bug:
>
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8
>
> As far as I know, the only thing actually blocking us from doing this
> was something like IE5 on Mac printing transparent images with black
> backgrounds. That's probably not relevant anymore. We're still stuck
> with the fact that IE6 doesn't support alpha channels, though -- we
> could make the fully-transparent parts of the background transparent,
> but I don't see how we could avoid aliasing effects on sane browsers
> without making things look extremely ugly on IE6.
>
Aren't there various workarounds using JS and filters for IE6?

Marco

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Nov 17, 2009, 7:45 AM

Post #4 of 29 (2514 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Marco Schuster
<marco [at] harddisk> wrote:
> Aren't there various workarounds using JS and filters for IE6?

Yes, but my understanding is that they perform poorly.

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lists at schwen

Nov 17, 2009, 8:07 AM

Post #5 of 29 (2508 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

>> Aren't there various workarounds using JS and filters for IE6?
> Yes, but my understanding is that they perform poorly.

So you'd rather have it look crappy for everybody rather than just for
IE6 users?
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

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Nov 17, 2009, 8:27 AM

Post #6 of 29 (2516 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Daniel Schwen <lists [at] schwen> wrote:
> So you'd rather have it look crappy for everybody rather than just for
> IE6 users?
> That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I didn't say that. But we would have to evaluate the impact of our
changes on IE6, which is like 15% of Wikipedia's audience last I
checked. In particular, just using alpha channels without regard to
IE6 would greatly degrade display in IE6, but improve appearance in
other browsers only slightly (since in almost all cases, equations are
on a white background anyway).

The obvious first step is to use binary transparency for the white
background, which won't hurt IE6 or any other browser. It will leave
a somewhat ugly white halo around the text in non-IE6 browsers if it's
not on a white background, but that's probably better than an entire
block of pure white as we have now.

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b-jorsch at northwestern

Nov 17, 2009, 10:05 AM

Post #7 of 29 (2507 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:11:13AM -0500, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>
> As far as I know, the only thing actually blocking us from doing this
> was something like IE5 on Mac printing transparent images with black
> backgrounds. That's probably not relevant anymore.

There's also the potential issue of people who set their stylesheets to
something like green-on-black (e.g. [[en:MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin]])
instead of black-on-white. Unless the plan is to make the formula text
color a user preference?

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Nov 17, 2009, 10:07 AM

Post #8 of 29 (2517 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Brad Jorsch <b-jorsch [at] northwestern> wrote:
> There's also the potential issue of people who set their stylesheets to
> something like green-on-black (e.g. [[en:MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin]])
> instead of black-on-white. Unless the plan is to make the formula text
> color a user preference?

It's unlikely we'd do that, so you have a good point.

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 17, 2009, 11:50 PM

Post #9 of 29 (2502 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 20:07, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Brad Jorsch <b-jorsch [at] northwestern> wrote:
>> There's also the potential issue of people who set their stylesheets to
>> something like green-on-black (e.g. [[en:MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin]])
>> instead of black-on-white. Unless the plan is to make the formula text
>> color a user preference?
>
> It's unlikely we'd do that, so you have a good point.

Yeah, I see the whole image-based approach can be really problematic.

Have anyone considered using jsMath instead? At least they claim
compatibility with really wide range of browsers/versions:
http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/browsers.html

--
Alex

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 17, 2009, 11:53 PM

Post #10 of 29 (2492 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 09:50, Alexander Shulgin <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 20:07, Aryeh Gregor
> <Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Brad Jorsch <b-jorsch [at] northwestern> wrote:
>>> There's also the potential issue of people who set their stylesheets to
>>> something like green-on-black (e.g. [[en:MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin]])
>>> instead of black-on-white. Unless the plan is to make the formula text
>>> color a user preference?
>>
>> It's unlikely we'd do that, so you have a good point.
>
> Yeah, I see the whole image-based approach can be really problematic.
>
> Have anyone considered using jsMath instead? At least they claim
> compatibility with really wide range of browsers/versions:
> http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/browsers.html

Oops, but here comes a great deal of caveats with MSIE (version
unspecified on the page):
http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/bugs.html

So this needs closer research.

--
Alex

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Nov 18, 2009, 8:15 AM

Post #11 of 29 (2483 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Alexander Shulgin
<alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> Yeah, I see the whole image-based approach can be really problematic.
>
> Have anyone considered using jsMath instead? At least they claim
> compatibility with really wide range of browsers/versions:
> http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/browsers.html

It looks like that uses images as well, at least unless you install
their special fonts. In the long term we probably want to use MathML
-- HTML5 currently requires MathML support, and Firefox 3.6 does
support it in text/html if you turn on the HTML5 parser. It might be
supported in text/html by default in 3.7 (I don't know when they plan
to make the HTML5 parser default). For the short term, we might
consider at least allowing foreground and background colors to be
changed inline on a per-<math> basis -- I'd guess this would be pretty
simple.

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 18, 2009, 11:12 PM

Post #12 of 29 (2466 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 18:15, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Alexander Shulgin
> <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
>> Yeah, I see the whole image-based approach can be really problematic.
>>
>> Have anyone considered using jsMath instead? At least they claim
>> compatibility with really wide range of browsers/versions:
>> http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/browsers.html
>
> ... For the short term, we might
> consider at least allowing foreground and background colors to be
> changed inline on a per-<math> basis -- I'd guess this would be pretty
> simple.

I agree. I'm willing to contribute some C or C++ code to do the low
level stuff of changing colors in the image. How do I proceed?

--
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maxsem.wiki at gmail

Nov 19, 2009, 8:20 AM

Post #13 of 29 (2461 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On 19.11.2009, 10:12 Alexander wrote:

> I agree. I'm willing to contribute some C or C++ code to do the low
> level stuff of changing colors in the image. How do I proceed?

It might shock you, but MediaWiki's math handling system is written in
ML (or OCAML? Nobody knows for sure except for the guy who wrote it):D

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Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 19, 2009, 8:31 AM

Post #14 of 29 (2463 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 18:20, Max Semenik <maxsem.wiki [at] gmail> wrote:
> On 19.11.2009, 10:12 Alexander wrote:
>
>> I agree. I'm willing to contribute some C or C++ code to do the low
>> level stuff of changing colors in the image. How do I proceed?
>
> It might shock you, but MediaWiki's math handling system is written in
> ML (or OCAML? Nobody knows for sure except for the guy who wrote it):D

And how comes we can't post-process resulting PNG images with a
program written in a different language? :)

--
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Nov 19, 2009, 9:49 AM

Post #15 of 29 (2468 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Alexander Shulgin
<alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> I agree. I'm willing to contribute some C or C++ code to do the low
> level stuff of changing colors in the image. How do I proceed?

That's almost certainly unnecessary. texvc already uses some type of
image processor (dvipng?) that can presumably be configured to output
in any desired color. This part should thus be a one-line change --
see the patch at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9341>
for how it would likely be done. The rest of the patch would be
hacking PHP (and maybe OCaml, ugh) code to accept the new parameter
and pass it down to the right place. includes/Math.php would likely
be the place to start here.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Alexander Shulgin
<alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> And how comes we can't post-process resulting PNG images with a
> program written in a different language? :)

We really don't want to increase the amount of non-PHP code in core
unless absolutely necessary, IMO. PHP is an awful language, but it's
the only thing that all current MediaWiki developers know. Anything
else is much harder to maintain, because only some subset of people
with commit access can competently alter it. I'm sure most committers
know basic C syntax, but few would be confident enough to make
significant changes to a C program (and if they tried they'd probably
introduce giant memory leaks and such). Just a while ago, it took
days to fix a simple XSS in Timeline because it was written in Perl.

Besides, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. dvipng (which is
apparently used here) should be able to do whatever we want, as far as
I can tell. Failing that, ImageMagick or such would likely do the
trick.

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 20, 2009, 12:39 AM

Post #16 of 29 (2453 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 19:49, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Alexander Shulgin
> <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
>> I agree. I'm willing to contribute some C or C++ code to do the low
>> level stuff of changing colors in the image. How do I proceed?
>
> That's almost certainly unnecessary. texvc already uses some type of
> image processor (dvipng?) that can presumably be configured to output
> in any desired color. This part should thus be a one-line change --
> see the patch at <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9341>
> for how it would likely be done. The rest of the patch would be
> hacking PHP (and maybe OCaml, ugh) code to accept the new parameter
> and pass it down to the right place. includes/Math.php would likely
> be the place to start here.

Unfortunately, this is not that easy or probably just impossible.

Turns out, that for that particular page (and most likely for other
pages which have this problem), the background of table heading is
specified through table class (hence, CSS):

in mediawiki:
{| class="standard"

in html:
<table class="standard">

So, there can be no way to provide non-alpha transparent image to
satisfy all possible styles. And alpha-transparency won't do the
trick for styles with black background. Duh!

I think we cannot do something sensible now, so we'll just have to
wait for MathML support from most popular browsers.

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Alex

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Nov 21, 2009, 3:30 PM

Post #17 of 29 (2374 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Alexander Shulgin
<alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> So, there can be no way to provide non-alpha transparent image to
> satisfy all possible styles.

No, but if the overwhelming majority of viewers see a light blue
background, it would make a lot more sense to have a light blue
background on the formula than a white background. Both will look
wrong on some style, but they may as well at least look right on the
default style.

> I think we cannot do something sensible now, so we'll just have to
> wait for MathML support from most popular browsers.

That's definitely the long-term solution.

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alex.shulgin at gmail

Nov 22, 2009, 11:42 PM

Post #18 of 29 (2291 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 01:30, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Alexander Shulgin
> <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
>> So, there can be no way to provide non-alpha transparent image to
>> satisfy all possible styles.
>
> No, but if the overwhelming majority of viewers see a light blue
> background, it would make a lot more sense to have a light blue
> background on the formula than a white background. Both will look
> wrong on some style, but they may as well at least look right on the
> default style.

Hey, I think I've found a really simple one-liner change to fix this
(in default style):

th img.tex { border: 1px solid; border-color: #AAA; }

At least it makes the bug look like a feature. :-)

--
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Alex

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b-jorsch at northwestern

Nov 23, 2009, 10:11 AM

Post #19 of 29 (2278 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 06:30:35PM -0500, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Alexander Shulgin
> <alex.shulgin [at] gmail> wrote:
> > So, there can be no way to provide non-alpha transparent image to
> > satisfy all possible styles.
>
> No, but if the overwhelming majority of viewers see a light blue
> background, it would make a lot more sense to have a light blue
> background on the formula than a white background. Both will look
> wrong on some style, but they may as well at least look right on the
> default style.

If we want to skip transparency and just allow changing the background
to any other solid color, it looks like it's pretty easy for a
bare-bones fix: just add this as line 736 (in r59357) of texutil.ml:

| "\\pagecolor" -> (tex_use_color (); LITERAL (TEX_ONLY "\\pagecolor"))

Then people can use the "\pagecolor{...}" command to change the
background just as they can use "\color{...}" now to change the
foreground color (see [[m:Help:Math#Color]]).

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Nov 23, 2009, 10:23 AM

Post #20 of 29 (2273 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Brad Jorsch <b-jorsch [at] northwestern> wrote:
> If we want to skip transparency and just allow changing the background
> to any other solid color, it looks like it's pretty easy for a
> bare-bones fix: just add this as line 736 (in r59357) of texutil.ml:
>
> | "\\pagecolor" -> (tex_use_color (); LITERAL (TEX_ONLY "\\pagecolor"))
>
> Then people can use the "\pagecolor{...}" command to change the
> background just as they can use "\color{...}" now to change the
> foreground color (see [[m:Help:Math#Color]]).

That sounds fairly sensible. Are there any objections? The annoying
thing will be if the default background color is changed, and all the
math images in a namespace suddenly look wrong.

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Nov 29, 2009, 8:46 AM

Post #21 of 29 (1929 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
> I've whitelisted \definecolor and \pagecolor in r59550. I'm resolving
> bug 8 as LATER, and suggest it only be reopened when either IE6
> reaches <1% market share, or it can be demonstrated that we can do
> transparency without significantly hurting IE6 users' experience when
> reading math articles.

Er, sorry, I take that back. A patch to allow wiki administrators to
configure texvc to output a non-white background would still be
accepted. But not one to make the images transparent by default,
unless it somehow plays nicely with IE6.

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marco at harddisk

Nov 29, 2009, 9:19 AM

Post #22 of 29 (1924 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 5:46 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail<Simetrical%2Bwikilist [at] gmail>
> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Aryeh Gregor
> <Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail <Simetrical%2Bwikilist [at] gmail>> wrote:
>
But not one to make the images transparent by default,
> unless it somehow plays nicely with IE6.
>
Who cares about that browser?? It's been history for years! I really doubt
that ANYONE still using that bitrotten thing of a browser cares about
alpha-transparency or Wikipedia in general, and I don't think more time,
money or energy should be wasted on making anything look ok on it - as long
as a IE6 user is still able to read the text, it's ok IMO.

Marco
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Nov 29, 2009, 9:28 AM

Post #23 of 29 (1926 views)
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Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco [at] harddisk> wrote:
> Who cares about that browser??

~15% of our users use it. If our goal is to make a broadly usable
website, we care about it.

> as long as a IE6 user is still able to read the text, it's ok IMO.

We need to weigh the interests of our users without regard to
politics. A significant degradation for 15% of users is simply not
acceptable to trade off against a slight improvement for the fraction
of a percent who view equations on non-white backgrounds. Graceful
degradation is okay, especially when adding new features. But making
all equations look horribly blocky is not graceful, and can only be
justified if there would be major gains for users of other browsers.

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marco at harddisk

Nov 29, 2009, 10:00 AM

Post #24 of 29 (1924 views)
Permalink

Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail<Simetrical%2Bwikilist [at] gmail>
> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Marco Schuster
> <marco [at] harddisk> wrote:
> > Who cares about that browser??
>
> ~15% of our users use it. If our goal is to make a broadly usable
> website, we care about it.

So what? They'll see blocky images, but can make out what the content is.

> > as long as a IE6 user is still able to read the text, it's ok IMO.
>
> We need to weigh the interests of our users without regard to
> politics.
>
Sometimes this is necessary though. Many people today still don't know that
IE6 is dangerous. Wikipedia should warn those users and tell them how to
upgrade.

Marco
--
VMSoft GbR
Nabburger Str. 15
81737 München
Geschäftsführer: Marco Schuster, Volker Hemmert
http://vmsoft-gbr.de
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Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Nov 29, 2009, 10:38 AM

Post #25 of 29 (1921 views)
Permalink

Re: [MediaWiki] Enhancement: LaTeX images quality (eliminate white background) [In reply to]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco [at] harddisk> wrote:
> So what?

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Is our goal to make a
high-quality encyclopedia for everyone, or only for people who don't
use IE6? Do those people count less for some reason? Should we
ignore people who use text terminals or screen readers too, because
they're a (much smaller) minority who are (much more) annoying to
support?

Where it's better for our overall user base to not support IE6, then
we should do that. And we do, in plenty of ways. But that's clearly
not the case here. Transparent math images would provide zero benefit
to virtually all non-IE6 users, so there's no possible justification
for significantly degrading display for IE6 users. The cost-benefit
analysis is crystal-clear.

> Sometimes this is necessary though. Many people today still don't know that
> IE6 is dangerous. Wikipedia should warn those users and tell them how to
> upgrade.

If anyone has managed to successfully avoid upgrading to IE7 or 8
despite all of Microsoft's campaigning and attempts at auto-update,
then it's very likely that they know exactly what they're doing and
have made an informed decision to stick with IE6. We are in no
position to second-guess that.

In practice, rumor suggests that the large majority of IE6
installations are on corporate sites, where IT is unwilling to spend
the money testing and deploying a major change when things work well
enough already. IE7 breaks a lot of sites that were coded to work
only in IE6, particularly corporate intranet sites that ignored
compatibility because they knew everyone would only run IE6 (since IT
required it).

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