Here is a MSDN blog on hopeful standards improvement for IE7
[http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx]. If this comes to
pass, there will be the issue of how long until enough users have upgraded so
that IE 5 and eventually 6 can be less of an impact on development.
--------------
Ian Skinner
Web Programmer
BloodSource
www.BloodSource.org
Sacramento, CA
"C code. C code run. Run code run. Please!"
- Cynthia Dunning
-----------------------
Standards and CSS in IE
I'm very happy that we've shipped IE 7 beta 1. I wanted to make it clear that
we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our
standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about
this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so
due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we
could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this
will be better in Beta 2 - and I want to share how we are placing our
priorities in IE.
In the web platform team that I lead, our top priority is (and will likely
always be) security - not just mechanical "fix buffer overruns" type stuff, but
innovative stuff like the anti-phishing work and low-rights IE. For IE7 in
particular, our next major priority is removing the biggest causes of
difficulty for web developers. To that end, we've dug through a lot of sites
detailing IE bugs that cause pain for web developers, like PositionIsEverything
and Quirksmode, and categorized and investigated those issues; we've taken
feedback from you directly (yes, we do read the responses to our blog posts) on
what bugs affect you the most and what features you'd most like to see, and
we've planned out what we can and can't do in IE7.
In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we
can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as
well. Though you won't see (most of) these until Beta 2, we have already fixed
the following bugs from PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:
* Peekaboo bug
* Guillotine bug
* Duplicate Character bug
* Border Chaos
* No Scroll bug
* 3 Pixel Text Jog
* Magic Creeping Text bug
* Bottom Margin bug on Hover
* Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
* IE/Win Line-height bug
* Double Float Margin Bug
* Quirky Percentages in IE
* Duplicate indent
* Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
* 1 px border style
* Disappearing List-background
* Fix width:auto
In addition we've added support for the following
* HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
* Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
* CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
* CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
* Alpha channel in PNG images
* Fix :hover on all elements
* Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies
with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been
Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7
through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform
difficult to use for web developers.
In that vein, I've seen a lot of comments asking if we will pass the Acid2
browser test published by the Web Standards Project when IE7 ships. I'll go
ahead and relieve the suspense by saying we will not pass this test when IE7
ships. The original Acid Test tested only the CSS 1 box model, and actually
became part of the W3C CSS1 Test Suite since it was a fairly narrow test - but
the Acid 2 Test covers a wide set of functionality and standards, not just from
CSS2.1 and HTML 4.01, selected by the authors as a "wish list" of features
they'd like to have. It's pointedly not a compliance test (from the Test Guide:
"Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification"). As a wish list,
it is really important and useful to my team, but it isn't even intended, in my
understanding, as our priority list for IE7.
We fully recognize that IE is behind the game today in CSS support. We've dug
through the Acid 2 Test and analyzed IE's problems with the test in some great
detail, and we've made sure the bugs and features are on our list - however,
there are some fairly large and difficult features to implement, and they will
not all sort to the top of the stack in IE7. I believe we are doing a much
better service to web developers out there in IE7 by fixing our known
bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs and usability problems first, and prioritizing
the most commonly-requested features based on all the feedback we've had.
I do want to be clear that I believe the Web Standards Project and my team has
a common goal of making the lives of web developers better by improving
standards support, and I'm excited that we're working together to that end.
- Chris Wilson
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