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IE and CSS "Compliance"

I was surprised that when I got back from vacationing in Hawaii to read a Slashdot post by Jeff Reifman about an article Paul Thurrott wrote...last year.  I read Slashdot regularly, and it didn’t make sense; not only is this old information, but it’s not even factually correct (which I’d like to think is a requirement for Slashdot posts).

Jeff did later figure out the article was from last year, and edited his post. And others have pointed out that Paul has made several posts since last year about IE7.  I’d recommend reading them, such as this one from (THIS) June reviewing IE 7 Beta 3, which seems to indicate Paul thinks we might be heading in the right direction.

As for IE’s CSS compliance, I’d love to have a honest, straightforward, unbiased statement of exactly where we (and other browsers) are – despite the fact that I know we would be behind today.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that exists; any “statistical analysis” of support is by nature biased.  How do bugs count against you?  For example, one of the big developer complaints in IE6 was that we didn’t support “background-position: fixed” on non-BODY elements – but we passed the W3C CSS1 test suite, because we supported it properly on the BODY element.  And we support the ‘float’ property, and pass the set of tests in the CSS1 test suite – but even in IE7, we have some bugs in interacting with width and height, which is one of the contributing factors to us not passing the Acid 2 test suite.  Your personal view may be that that’s as bad or worse than not supporting ‘float’ at all, but a lot of designs in use on the web today require floating.

The site that Jeff’s post referred to (developed by David Hammond) is weighted in a way that makes IE in particular look bad (not particularly surprising, given some of the other pages on the site) – for example, it dings our support of each CSS property, one at a time, simply because we support a proprietary “CSS expressions” feature; similarly, the fact that we don’t support the ‘inherit’ property value across all CSS properties is counted against us one for each property, not as a global feature as it would be implemented and used.  Most unfortunately, there are no more details on many of the problems David encountered, or test cases that my team can test against.  When I contacted David a year or so ago, he couldn’t give me any further details, so I’m not even sure how we make progress against that site.  Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help – which is why we have a public bug database.  I’d also like to turn comments like "IE 6 and IE 7 failed to render even basic columnar layouts in CSS" in to solid work items, but I don’t understand the problem - much of the web uses columnar layouts that work in IE.  Is this a request for CSS3 multicolumn support, or a narrow bug with the way you’re trying to do columnar layouts?

The one thing that really burns my personal toast is that we’ve been working hard to improve our standards support in IE7, and I believe it is simply wrong to think that we’ve only moved the needle 2%.  In fact, we prioritized IE7 around 3 things – security, end user experience, and standards improvements in the platform.  When I look back at the work my team has done in the platform, we have done only these things.  No proprietary features added, just standards improvements.  (Look forward to an upcoming IEBlog post from Markus Mielke listing out the CSS changes we’ve done in IE7.)  I feel that we’ve addressed the biggest problems and shortcomings from IE6 for web developers and designers, and we’re hard at work shipping IE7 and getting ready to doing it again in the next release.  As I previously stated, our goal is to make the lives of web developers better by improving standards support in IE.  I think we’ve done a lot in IE7 to do just that, and I’m looking forward to doing even more.

But now I’m feeding the trolls, so I’m just going to go play my newly-acquired ukulele and chant under my breath Some...People...Get...It" (possibly to the tune of “Tiny Bubbles.”)

-Chris

Published Thursday, August 10, 2006 10:55 AM by cwilso

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Thursday, August 10, 2006 5:47 PM by Dave Massy's WebLog

# Standards Again!

Standards are important and there's yet another debate going on over at http://digg.com/tech_news/IE7_is_basically_non_compliant_with_CSS_web_standards with...
Thursday, August 10, 2006 6:12 PM by David Hammond

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 (which was labeled "layout complete" and was thus the logical release to begin testing) introduced some pretty nasty regressions that beta 3 then fixed. In the last day or so, I have updated some of this information that it set IE7 apart of IE6 by a total of 4% in CSS 2.1 support. This is about as much as Firefox and Opera each improved in their latest versions, so this isn't some sort of gross underestimation, it's simply showing just how big and complex the CSS standard is.

I recently write a blog post (http://www.webdevout.net/tidings/) addressing the claim that you guys haven't done enough work in IE7 and defending you guys, so it's kind of upsetting that you make me out as someone who is willing to twist the truth to make Internet Explorer look as bad as possible. In my blog post (which at this moment is down due to my site being frontpaged on digg), I laid the blame not on Microsoft's current actions, but on its past actions: adding all of those proprietary features and then abandoning core engine development for so long. If the Gecko developers did the same, Gecko would also be terribly behind the times and would have a heck of a time trying to catch up.

I honestly don't know if it's possible to catch up, considering that developers of other browsers are likely willing to put in just as much work as you guys. But I do believe that you guys are really trying now and I have seen some good results. I'm not going to ignore where IE is lacking support ("inherit" is a very important fundamental feature) but my goal is not to make one browser look better than another. This is a resource that I use myself, and I want every bug in every browser to be noted right where I expect to look.

The main problem is that IE does things wrong at such a fundamental level that there are bugs stacked on top of bugs. Many CSS properties have multiple bugs in them, and if a new version fixes one of those bugs, the others still warrant an "I" rating for the property value. I'm sorry, but I don't know of a more objective way I can rate features at that low of a level.

Back when you initially contacted me, my resource was at a much more primitive stage and the site pretty much took data from other similar resources along with some personally tested information. Since then, I have expanded the tables and tested *everything* personally, and I believe I am very specific in the descriptions I give for the bugs. If you have a question about something, please ask me. If I can't give you a demonstration of exactly what is wrong, I will correct my data.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 6:19 PM by David Hammond

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Oh, and in regards to the "inherit" property value, you ask why I list it for every single property when it's obviously a "global feature". Well it obviously isn't. "inherit" is supported for the "direction" property, and as far as I can tell nothing else. So no, it doesn't seem to be a global feature, it seems to be something you implemented on a property-by-property basis.

The upside to how it is listed is that if you add support for "inherit" in some version of IE, that would be an instance percentage boost in my tables, and I feel rightly so. I have listed "inherit" with every property since just about the beginning of my tables and I see no reason to single it out as something different. It is, after all, listed individually with every feature in the specifications.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 6:30 PM by Austin Liu

# IE6 hobbled web dev. for years. Please, please don't do it again!

As a web developer, I can testify that making sites work with IE easily consumes the bulk of my time, almost as much as coding the site itself (which is rather easy with tools such as Dreamweaver). Cut it out! Microsoft doesn't own the web, and it should stop arrogantly acting like it does and start playing by agreed upon standards.

IE's shoddy security, long time since the last update, and the apparent ignoring of web standards is unacceptable; all this simply goes to vindicating the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft: a monopoly has no incentive to strive for excellence (unless the monopoly has an inner driving passion for it, like Apple has, though it is a "monopoly" over its own little market).

Make web standards compliance a priority! I'm not going to ignore such a large segment of my target audience as Firefox + Safari, and Microsoft doesn't even make IE for Mac anymore, though that market segment is rapidly growing, and has a lot of disposable income.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 6:55 PM by thekak

# IE7: Don't make the same mistake of IE6

When it takes you over 5 years to release an OS, let a lone a simple browser... why not just do it right this time?

Just make it work like FF and be comliant ffs. Don't try and be fancy, make something that actually works. Proprietary is lame. Stop it.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 8:05 PM by Dave

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Listen Microsoft, I'm sick and tired of having to adapt all my designs to your buggy browsers. If you can't do it just integrate Mozilla in there and stop taking advantage of your position to make the rest of us waste our time to accomodate you.

There I said it.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:34 PM by Scott

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Wow, this is one ugly blog.  Why do you have a picture behind your menu?  It makes it really hard to read.  Is this the same mentality that went into the IE design?

BTW, the term Albatross really applies to what IE has been for developers over last 9 years.  Was the reference intentional?

Albatross:
"sometimes used to mean an encumbrance, or a wearisome burden." --wikipedia
Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:35 PM by Brian Van

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I give credit where credit is due to the IE7 team, and they seem to be doing a great job in progressing to their goals in building a better product for the user. But let's be realistic... if you're far from standards-compliant and up-to-date with CSS support, then you should get dinged for it.

I know that most of the complaining results from past mistakes in IE's overall design, but it seems that IE7 is going to keep making many of those mistakes. And for what purpose? If you believe that standards-compliance is beneficial to the user, then build the standards into the browser. If you don't think standards-compliance will benefit anyone, then do things your own way, and if anyone complains then you'll have your moment to explain why your way of doing things is better. But if you claim that you're trying to be standards-compliant and you release a new browser with all the same bugs and standards-holes that IE6 has, then you should expect to be criticized among the designer community. It's just the way it is. Regardless of the fact that the source article was a year old and was factually incorrect and not up-to-date, there's still a general problem that exists no matter how much closer you are to the standards-compliance goal. You're still not close enough.

I totally sympathize with your development team for all the work they must to do try to stay competitive in this application environment. Believe me, I know that you're attempting something very difficult and that you can't keep everyone pleased. But as a web developer, I don't want to keep running afoul of nasty, ugly suprises when trying to implement features that my clients EXPECT, features that they've seen implemented in the sloppiest, most convoluted ways on other businesses' websites. My CSS development process is competing against table template jockeys across the world, and it's very difficult for me to justify proper CSS practices when I'm spending hours trying to figure out how IE6 and IE5 are messing up my CSS layouts and the table template jockeys don't have to think at all. You cannot do anything about versions 1-6 at this point, but  from this point on I'd rather clean hacks out of my old websites and require IE7 for browsing as opposed to supporting a new browser with a couple of big bugs fixed and a couple of big standards violations still there. Ending the browser-hack culture would be your biggest possible achievement as a development team, and it's almost pointless to shoot for any softer goals if you want the support of the developer and power user communities. The disruption of eliminating these long-standing bugs and standards violations now would not nearly approach the cumulative pain of having to continue to design "workarounds" for basic things like alpha blending, float positioning and precise box-widths. (again, things that are expected without exception by my clients)
Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:55 PM by BTreeHugger

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I would like to thank the IE7 team for their honest efforts, and hope that Microsoft gives them more power over the project next time. It's about time you were given the chance to do something worthwhile with IE, since it has not really been worth using since IE5 in terms of scaling up with features.
As with most developers I hope you managed to get the basics working, like HTML and CSS 2, so that the world can move on like they did from Netscape 4. It is unfair that most of my audience has to download a separate stylesheet, and that I have to pollute my work with extra markup.
I know fixing all of these things is unreasonable, since you have to catch up in such a short timeframe, but please get your superiors to stop focusing on other proprietary technologies for a while, just long enough to bring yourselves up to at least status quo.
Thanks, good luck, and keep up the work.. we know what you guys are forced to work with/on, and realise that you have a finite amount of hair and time to lose.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 11:23 PM by Chris

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Our organization's website is built using standards-based CSS. It is driving our users mad, and our IT staff crazy how long it takes IE6 to render those standards-based pages.

I have simply told our users to use Firefox until IE7 ships. Our user base is now around 3 thousand. Please fix IE7 to handle code such as CSS correctly. If you don't, I regrettably cannot in good conscience recommend IE7 to our users.
Thank you.
Chris
Thursday, August 10, 2006 11:26 PM by fanboy

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

We're not asking for much, we're not asking for total 100% css compliance, we're after more css improvements. The CSS improvements in IE7 were only minor fixes from IE6. Do we have to wait for many more years for any decent changes? *sigh*
Friday, August 11, 2006 3:12 AM by Andy Mabbett

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

This page has 67 HTML validation errors. Its CSS has 7 errors and a number of warnings about things which will affect accessibility.

The left hand menu is unreadable.

If you can;t get these things right, or don;t care to, how can you hope to comply with standards elsewhere?
Friday, August 11, 2006 3:43 AM by Tim Wouters

# Give IE7 a break, will ya?

There's one thing all you yay-to-nay-switchers out there seem to forget.

A 4% increase in standards compliance may not seem like much, but it DOES address the most common IE6 shenanigans that have been bugging us for years (see positioniseverything.net). So our everyday development experience WILL get better.

And it shows already. Try the thrusted "build for the best, then fix for the rest" method on a new site project. Preview in Firefox, Opera, Safari AND the IE7 beta. Some pixel jogs aside, all things will look pretty decent. Now take a look with IE6 and you will see just how much IE has improved.

Specs are nothing. Execution is everything.
Friday, August 11, 2006 7:02 AM by Gaspar

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I think IE team now is in the right way. IF all follow the rules and try to do exactly like they are described then would be easy to all development guys.

CSS have some issues like vertical-align, in some ways height could be a problem too and if all follow different ways then would be more difficult. who will be wronged is all web and the users, and i think this all about users.

Congratulations, Chris and team
Dont forget that nobody can please all people.
Sow go on
Friday, August 11, 2006 8:28 AM by Internet Explorer 7 und Standardunterst??tzung – SELFHTML aktuell Weblog

# Internet Explorer 7 und Standardunterst??tzung – SELFHTML aktuell Weblog

PingBack from http://aktuell.de.selfhtml.org/weblog/internet-explorer-7-standards
Friday, August 11, 2006 1:11 PM by Chris

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Until IE behaves like Firefox, Opera and Safari, (i.e. I am free to design within the limitations of CSS and not the limitations of IE) then you will continue to be hated by web developers.  IE has spent years and years doing *nothing* and deservedly garnering bile-inducing hatred from web developers.

Your smug "some people get it" arrogance is exactly why IE is a piece of crap.  IE6 languished for years in its diseased state because of arrogance.  Only after you began losing marketshare was some of Microsoft's arrogance dissipated long enough to get off its bloated ass and do something about it.

There is one and only one test to determine if IE& is worth a damn and it is this - does our browser comply with standards?  Do pages rendered in your browser look identical to pages rendered in Safari, Firefox or Opera without any stupid hacks?  If you can say yes to that fact, then your job is done.

You know this.  Please don't insult our intelligence by looking us in the face and ask "what's wrong with IE?".  Microsoft has spent years doing ab-so-lute-ly nothing with God-awful IE 6.  Surely, you can't expect instant goodwill from web developers just because you're working on a new version of IE?

Until IE is reasonably standards-compliant you can expect no quarter from us.  We've spent too much time designing web sites that will work for CSS and then work for IE.  We've destroyed budgets, pissed off our bosses, irritated clients and made development more expensive because of your little (Rosemary's) baby.

We web developers fully aware that when your sweaty, monkey-boy of a boss was leaping around onstage  chanting "developers! developers! developers!" he most certainly wasn't thinking about us.

Despite the tone of this post, I truly and earnestly do wish you the best of success with IE7 and look forward to an excellent browsing *and* developing experience with it.

You'll just have to pardon me for not holding my breath given your company's past behavior.
Friday, August 11, 2006 1:54 PM by Chris Wilson

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

@David: I’m sorry that you took my comment to read “[David] is making Internet Explorer look as bad as possible”.  That’s not what I meant.  I think any non-binary analysis of “how much” CSS (or nearly any complex standard) is supported by a particular implementation is going to be biased.  I disagree with some of the biases that show in your weighting; as I said, I think taking a discount for every property because we support the proprietary dynamic properties weights against us fairly heavily.  I’m not sure I understand your interpretation system (http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support.php?uas=IE6-IE7-FX1_5-OP8-OP9#interpret), but it would seem that just that “incomplete” for every property would tend to normalize us to 50%.  Perhaps I’m misunderstanding how the numbers are arrived at.  Additionally, as I’ve said, without this being tied directly to public test cases that you simply click through – e.g., as an individual I should be able to take a copy of your site, click through the tests myself, and get identical numerical answers - I don’t even know how to make consistent progress against this.

As an aside, I also disagree that “inherit” is a very important fundamental feature.  We implemented it for visibility (not direction) – because it has significant implications in how you can trim out branches of the display tree (you can have visible sections inside a visibility:hidden branch, which is not true of, say, “display: none”, and we needed to make our model support it – “inherit” *WAS* the initial value for the ‘visibility’ property in the CSS level 2 Recommendation, though I see it’s been changed in CSS 2.1 (to what end I don’t know).  I also seem to recall (though this was a long time ago, and I could easily be wrong) that “inherit” was initially NOT on all properties, but added after we created the visibility property with an inherit value.  For other properties, though, it seems mostly a trick for getting back the default values of normally-inherited properties, prior to some other stylesheet in the cascade being applied (for example, getting the font size to inherit through HTML table elements).  Neat, useful, etc., but not a universal panacea or anything.

Look, I personally need to be past laying blame, but I agree with you that where IE is now is a result of Microsoft’s past actions.  Your analysis, knowingly or not, feeds the perception that we aren’t doing anything about it, because your analysis was widely interpreted as “Microsoft only cared to move the standards-compliance needle 2% (4% now) with IE7.”  I believe that is a wildly inaccurate evaluation of how much we have cared about what web developers and consumers need, and how much we have made their lives better in IE7 (from IE6).  That’s all.  Again, I apologize if you thought I was being dismissive.

@Austin: I’m internally search-and-replace’ing all occurrences of “IE” in your comment (other than the Mac IE one) with IE6.  Would you care to make a comment on IE7?

@thekak: I would think the work my team has done in IE7 would prove that we tend to agree with you that proprietary is lame - as I said, we spent our resources in this product cycle making our standards support better.  David even said this in the post he mentioned.

@Scott:  I don’t give a flying leap if you think my blog is unattractive.  I’m not here to be pretty.  Use an RSS aggregator, and make it look however you want.  I can recommend one.  :)  And if you’d looked back at any of my previous posts, or looked in the box with the oh-so-ugly image, you’d know that I understand EXACTLY what an albatross is.

@Fanboy, et al: You’re invited to give us more input to help prioritize the issues.  We have a public database, you can vote on the issues.  Please do.

@Andy Mabbett:  I likewise do not care very much about the validation errors that the crappy blog software on this site uses.  I hope it will be improved; I’ve made such a request; I’m not gonna get my panties in a twist, nor am I going to spend any of my time fixing it by hand.  AFAIK, the HTML version of this blog is usable from IE, Mozilla and Opera; and the RSS version validates.  That’s good enough for me.  That's the last time I'm saying that, rather than simply deleting such comments.

Tim:  Thanks.  That was precisely the point I’ve been trying to get across, elegantly said.

“Chris” (sigh): And again – I’m talking about TODAY, not the last five years.  You’re free to complain about the past; I can certainly understand why; I’m not the person to blame, in fact I have a longstanding reputation as a heretic in the company, who is in the strongest position to say "I told you so"; but my "some people get it" statement was that some people get that we are moving in the right direction (at last, you can insert privately) in IE7 and beyond.  You might wish to actually read those links, and note that none of them is an unmitigated "IE ROXXXXX" post, but acknowledgment that we are doing right.

As for “does your browser comply with standards” – how do you test that?  How do you confirm that Opera “complies with standards”, or Mozilla, or Safari?  Do you (apparently alone of all people) never have to hack for any other browser?  I know that you hack far more for IE6 than anything else; I’m interested at this point in IE7.  I also know we’re behind in this area, so you don’t need to inform me.  I didn’t ask you “what’s wrong with IE”, because I’m not a moron.  I have asked, and will continue to ask, for help prioritizing where we need to go; I will also expect appropriate recognition that we are moving in the right direction.  Not that we’re done.

-Chris Wilson
Friday, August 11, 2006 1:59 PM by Brett Merkey

# It is important to have perspective

I treasure my right to excoriate IE on a daily basis but somehow I get the impression that much of the complaining comes from those with a very narrow perspective.

I have been using CSS exclusively for positioning since 2000. That is when I demonstrated to management, using IE5.0, how much faster development would be and how much cheaper operations and maintenance would be for our browser-based applications using CSS and W3C-recommended coding practices.

Much to my surprise, management agreed and our product dev teams since have certainly benefited by pushing CSS to the max.

Let's keep the pressure on software companies to improve Web software but let's focus on actually using the technology as we find it at any stage. It is all very usable and valuable *right now* in IE -- and has been for years.

Brett Merkey
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/bmerkey/
Friday, August 11, 2006 2:05 PM by Tim

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

While I don't mean to discount the imporovements the IE7 team has made to imporved standards support, it really strikes me as lazy.

Microsoft used to stand for innovation, but lately it's been playing catch-up in almost every regard. Instead of taking this LONG overdue update to 'do it right', IE7 simply fixes the largest and most dire standards bugs then finds excuses for not making other improvements.

Microsoft has the power and money to not only meet a FireFox-level compliance, but surpass it. It's pretty disappointing when the most powerful company in the IT business can't even keep up with an open source project.
Friday, August 11, 2006 2:33 PM by Thomas Tallyce

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Many web-devs are genuinely excited to see that real progress is apparently being made to the Trident engine.

However, literally millions and millions of person-hours must have been wasted trying to code around Trident/IE6's problems, and you can't expect people to simply be forgiving just like that.

The problem is not with the individuals in your team but the *business decision* by Microsoft to let the browser stagnate.

Given the really nasty PIE-style bugs in IE6, it seems fairly clear that a large amount of refactoring to a rather broken engine was presumably necessary to get MSHTML into a maintainable state.

The team should be contratulated for the clearly huge task of getting IE7 out the door, and in particular for making it an automatic upgrade. Later this year a very significant percentage of web users will all be using web browsers that won't require the sort hackery we've had to get used to for the last 5 years. Let's at least be thankful for that, and hope that MS will use the base of IE7 to build on further work, much as Chris and others have said they will.

What would really help now in silencing many of the critics here is to start to publish an expected roadmap or at least outline of the CSS/standards areas the IE team plan to work on for IE7.5/8.
Friday, August 11, 2006 2:44 PM by Klaus Hartl

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

"I know that you hack far more for IE6 than anything else; I’m interested at this point in IE7."

Chris, I'm sorry, do you really want to know that? I can give you an example from the real world. Have a look at the latest site I'm working on: <a href="http://plazes.com">http://plazes.com</a>, i.e. at the style sheet that is included for IE only (hidden by Conditional Comments).

As soon as IE 7 Beta 2 was told to be "layout complete" I started to test in IE 7 as well. And it appeared that - though you fixed the most infamous bugs in IE7 - I have to apply the same hacks for IE 6 and IE 7 in ca. 90% of all cases. The other 8% even worse I have to apply different hacks to IE 6 and IE 7 by using special hacks (thank god you implemented advanced css selectors in IE 7) and the rest IE 6 only.
Most of these bugs are related to elements having layout or not, which makes me starting to think that something fundamentally is wrong with IE's rendering engine. I really had some hopes for IE 7, but sadly enough it now seems to me that nearly nothing changed from a practical standpoint. I can see no use of advanced selectors if the rendering is still broken.

And by the way, the simple attribute selector <code>[type='text']</code> makes IE 7 crash.

And we haven't yet talked about fixes you did for JavaScript. Ah no, there aren't any (ok, besides of the native XHR object support - how native is it anyway?).
Friday, August 11, 2006 3:10 PM by Geoffrey Snddon

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

The question really should be whether if you had worked on standards since IE6 came out, would you be where Gecko, WebKit, KHTML and Presto are today. The fact that you didn't has been you've had to play catch-up, which, in the world of standards, isn't easy. You've made a fair amount of progress between IE6 and IE7 for the time it's taken.

The real question is why do you continue to improve and use Trident, if Tasman 1.0, which came out over 2 years ago, has better standards support anyway? If IE7 isn't integrated with the OS, what's stopping you?

Earlier today I was having an issue with a website I was working on in a single browser. Firefox. Safari, Opera, Konquerer and IE all rendered it as per the CSS spec. Firefox did not.

All browsers have bugs, not just some.

I have huge amounts of respect for anyone able to make a browser do anything anywhere near the CSS specs, as I can barely imagine how hard it must be to implement.

@Tim: I doubt that. The Mozilla Foundation is where it is because it's had huge numbers of developers contributing (far more than IE has had working on it, certainly) and it never fell behind the standards.
Friday, August 11, 2006 3:23 PM by David Hammond

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

@Chris Wilson: Thanks for pointing out that IE supports "inherit" on the "visibility" property. I must have missed that one. It does support it on the "direction" property as well.

In regards to the weighting system, as I said, there isn't really a more objective way to weigh three arbitrary bugs versus two on a given feature, so any level of incomplete support on a feature that can't clearly be broken down into further areas of support are simply given a round 50% when it comes to the calculations. If you can suggest a better way of doing this, I'm all ears.

I think the biggest issue with the percentages is the fact that features are not weighted based on real world importance. I have considered making some kind of public rating system that would influence the weight of a feature based on the number of votes and the average importance rating. That's on the shelf for future work.

In regards to the importance of the "inherit" property, I have done plenty of work on systems designed only to support modern layout engines (that is, without regard for Internet Explorer) and I find myself using the "inherit" value a lot. In a system I'm currently working on, the "inherit" value appears for the cursor, font, color, and line-height properties for various reason. In most of these cases, especially since it's a fully JavaScript-driven web application, it's *possible* to do without the "inherit" value and get the same result, but the value saves a lot of extra code. That's one of the kinds of things we web developers are always looking for. CSS is a very elegant language, but IE is lacking so many of the features that makes it so. In that respect, IE7 does have excellent improvements, particularly in regard to selectors. But there's still a ton of work to be done.

One thing that concerns me is all of the basic CSS parsing bugs and the fact that every single basic selector, combinator, pseudo-class, and pseudo-element has at least one known bug in IE7, while Firefox and Opera have perfect (as far as I have been able to see) support for most of them. Why do the universal selector, sibling combinators, and :first-child pseudo-class act like comments and doctypes are elements in IE7? Why don't attribute selectors properly recognize attributes in minimized form? Why does "!important!" act like "!important" rather than failing the property? Why can't comments exist between combinators and simple selectors? To me, someone who is obviously unfamiliar with Trident's source code, it seems that Trident has serious problems at a fundamental level and is in need of a major rewrite. I feel that if you guys were to begin working on such a rewrite, it could mean great things in the future.
Friday, August 11, 2006 3:56 PM by Web Devout tidings » Blog Archive » Web Devout was dugg

# Web Devout tidings &raquo; Blog Archive &raquo; Web Devout was dugg

PingBack from http://www.webdevout.net/tidings/2006/08/11/web-devout-was-dugg/
Friday, August 11, 2006 5:01 PM by Jacques PYRAT

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

OK, try my site and tell me why the left column is sometimes pushed under the content ?

IE6, FF, Safari, Opera 9 handle this site ok, but not IE7 beta 3.
shame !
Friday, August 11, 2006 5:55 PM by Arpad Borsos

# DOM and XHTML

IE's support for CSS has indeed improved, but there was no work done on DOM and XHTML (as application(xhtml+xml) support.
I recently worked a lot with DOM Events and its just a pain that IE does not support addEventListener... Ok, there are plenty of addEvent functions around but IMHO these are only workarounds. And I prefer the most standards compliant way, which would be addEventListener...
And why doesn't IE support application/xhtml+xml?  It doesn't even have to treat it specialy. I don't care for embedded SVG in IE as long as the site displays at all instead of opening a download dialog.
Friday, August 11, 2006 6:24 PM by Mark Reeder

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

First off, let me begin by thanking you and everyone else working hard to make IE7 better. You've squashed a number of particularly frustrating bugs and will make my life a little easier.

I think a lot of the frustration that people have is two-fold:
First, many people look at MS and see a huge company and think "If they *really* wanted to support standards, they could just devote more resources to it and get something done really fast." I know that's not exactly how things work (especially with trying to adhere to a spec. that is unclear/unworkable in some areas), but I think a lot of people feel that way. I applaud the efforts that have been made and hope that things will continue to move in a positive direction.
Second, just because IE7 is coming out now doesn't mean we can leave behind everyone that doesn't upgrade from IE6. In the short term, this means that we have to not only worry about IE7 (which introduces some new problems), but we still have to make sure that IE6 functions properly. It's probably going to be years before we can drop IE6 support. If IE7 hit even the low mark of the intersecting support of Firefox, Opera and Safari, most web developers would be cheering you instead of being frustrated about yet another platform to support.

There are going to be some serious growing pains when IE7 gets pushed out as a high-priority update. A lot of sites are going to break (yes, ones that work just fine in IE6, Firefox, Safari and Opera). This brings up another gripe - in order to do the necessary testing, we'll need yet another machine (physical or virtual) to test on as there is no way to run IE6 and IE7 side by side on the same system. However, even with the pains it's going to cause, the direction you're moving in is the right one. Thanks for what you're doing - keep it up.
Friday, August 11, 2006 6:28 PM by David Dickinson

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Chris ... what are the plans for updating IE7 when it's released?

I know that the focus has been on creating the new product, but will there be updates that address the standardization issues? I remember back in the day IE4.x, etc. would receive updates on a regular basis.

Thanks!
Friday, August 11, 2006 6:37 PM by Alfonso

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Good joke the one about the public bug database.

Yes, for a  moment I (foolish) thought it might be real and that from now on we could see how the bugs are fixed, search our problems and find some confirmation that this is a known problem and maybe even find a workaround.

So I filled a pair of bugs, they have existed from as long as I can remember and wish that this way I could learn when they would be fixed or have some insight about a solution that doesn't create any new bug.

But shortly after both (as lots of other bugs) were closed:
"Field Status changed from Active to Closed
Field Resolution changed from Not Set to Won't Fix"

So how the hell are we suppose to fill bugs if you just close them?
I could understand if you changed the status from Active to Future or something like that to indicate that the problem can't be addressed in time for the IE7 release, but marking real bugs as Won't fix just makes me delete the "bugtracking" system from my bookmarks. Why bother reproducing a bug, creating a simplified test case, redacting everything if you are going to dismiss it right away?

If you want us to take you seriously, then you have to start behaving seriously.

Friday, August 11, 2006 7:24 PM by Gérard Talbot

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Dear Mr Wilson,

You claim that IE 7 team worked hard and fixed many CSS bugs and compliance bugs. I'd say that we all agree on these 2 opinions. But there were already many CSS bugs and compliance bugs affecting MSIE 6 to begin with and MSIE 7 is still quite far from web-designers minimum floor of acceptability considering

a) the amount of time since CSS 1 has been released and CSS 2 has been officially released

b) the huge incredible time Microsoft had to take necessary measures to make its browser meet Microsoft's web-standards pretentions and claims during years. Everyone knows that Microsoft did not work on improving the browser (spec compliance, spec support and spec implementation correctness) between September 2001 and June 2004

c) the huge cooperation and constructive/positive collaboration Microsoft got from web designers and web-standards advocates/supporters regarding reporting reproducible bugs (along with clear testcases):
Peter-Paul Koch, Bruno Fassino, Holly Bergevin and John Gallant, Aleksandar Vacić (z-index), incutio.com, www.jehiah.com, etc,etc.et


Microsoft is a major corporation which has been claiming to support W3C web standards and to look at improving W3C web standards compliance in its browsers for many years. Nevertheless, you will NOT find a single webpage or a single webpage interactive demo at MSDN which will pass an HTML validation test, which will be using a strict HTML 4.01 DTD ensuring to trigger MSIE 6 or MSIE 7 into standards compliant rendering mode. So, since 1997 and still today, MSDN (and all of its articles, interactive webpage-examples) has been ignoring W3C web standards, de facto not promoting web standards conformance. Microsoft has had and still has a double-talk, a double-face and is following a double-standard.

More than 9 years ago, webstandards.org created this page

http://archive.webstandards.org/css/winie/inline.html

solely to notify Microsoft that it was not complying and conforming to web standards. Still today, in MSIE 7 beta 3, Microsoft has failed to comply. 9 years! Chances are it will take Microsoft 10 years to be able to render the page correctly!

Microsoft has only itself to blame for its bad (laziness, complacent, non-attentive/non-listening to web designers and webstandards supporters) reputation.

Where is the following document/when will the following document be brought back on microsoft.com website?

"Microsoft is committed to working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to implement W3C-approved HTML standards, and has confirmed its pledge to work through W3C and other standards bodies on enhancements to HTML and other key Web technologies."
http://www.microsoft.com/standards/intro.asp


Gérard Talbot
Friday, August 11, 2006 7:43 PM by Arthur

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Hi. I've been tracking the development of browsers since Microsoft licensed Spyglass' Mosaic sourcecode.

Since you appear to be a developer:
1. Does IE 7.0 still build on existing Mosaic code. (If you open the ABout box in IE 6.0, you'll still find references to Mosaic/Spyglass)
2. Or is IE 7.0 a complete engine rewrite (as in when Netscape's/Mozilla's Gecko).

Friday, August 11, 2006 8:13 PM by G&eacute;rard Talbot

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Mr Wilson, you said:
"(...) Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help (...)"

For over 18 months, Microsoft got an overwhelmingly good, positive, impressive and constructive response overall in that area from hundreds of people at wiki's channel9-feedback  website and in many web authors' personal sites.

CSS1 and CSS2.1 bugs in MSIE 6 with/without reduced demo cases:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerSupportforCSS

HTML 4 Support and spec violations

HTML 4 Conformance tests results at http://www.robinlionheart.com/stds/html4/results

W3C DRAFT HTML 4 Test Suite at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/HTML401/current/tests/index.html

Standards bugs (dozens and dozens of clearly explained, detailed, specific bugs with links, testcases, etc.):
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerStandardsSupport

&lt;font&gt; and vertical-align: top in malformed markup code + IE6 SP2 = Crash!
Everything had been nicely reported and clearly explained as soon as october 2003: it took than 30 months to Microsoft to fix this!

MSIE 7 beta 3 is unable to pass this CSS1 testpage:
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/css/inheritance/border-color/001.html

More bug collections sites at

   * MSIE 6 Crash bugs, MSIE 6 programming bugs, MSIE 6 DOM bugs at channel 9
   * Explorer exposed by Holly Bergevin and John Gallant (position is everything)
   * MSIE 6 web standards violations by Holly Bergevin and John Gallant (position is everything)
   * MSIE 6 Standards Support and related bugs at channel 9
   * 109 bugs reported regarding MSIE 6 at Peter-Paul Koch site
   * Hixie's evil CSS testcases by Ian Hickson
   * Wrong z-index implementation bugs by Aleksandar Vacić
   * CSS3 Selectors test suite results by Robert Blaut
   * MSIE 6 bugs collection by Marc Pacheco
   * Internet Explorer 6 bugs collection A very impressive list of testcases by Bruno Fassino. Lots of layout bugs can be found in MSIE 6 in those tests.

Specific MSIE 7 bug collection sites

   * MSIE 7 beta 2 bug collection (75 bugs) by Peter-Paul Koch
   * CSS bugs in MSIE 7 at incutio.com
   * MSIE 7 Beta 2 CSS Bugs at projectseven.com
   * The Float model problem at positioningiseverything.net
   * List item and hasLayout bugs at tanfa.co.uk
   * Internet Explorer 7 bugs collection A very impressive site of testcases done by Bruno Fassino

Everything is listed nicely at
http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/

Again, Microsoft can not blame others except its own long-lingering negligence, carelessness, lack of solid commitment, dormant activity during October 2001 to June 2004 period.

Gérard
P.S.: Your blogsite fails W3C markup validation, even with a HTML 4.0 transitional DTD.
Friday, August 11, 2006 9:22 PM by cooperpx

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

HEY CHRIS! DON'T GET BUMMED OUT MAN!

I'm pissed that I missed out on the last chat session. I wanted to drop in, while on vacation, to give your team a pat on the back. You guys have made lots of movement (considering the environment you work in) in a short time.

I have this idea you went to bat to get the budget to fix up CSS, and took on a herculean effort to get her done. IE7 won't be perfect, but it will be miles ahead of IE6 ... and that's what *you* set out to do.

Get her stable, Get her released, and Get back in there! After IE7, we'll get you a bunch of test suites or something to help out... Just tell us what you need.
Friday, August 11, 2006 10:22 PM by Erik Arvidsson

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

IE7b3 is an improvement over IE6 when it comes to CSS but I'm very surprised that some very crucial features were not fixed:

:active and :focus. You fixed :hover so you should have realized that these are important as well.

box-sizing. Please, the doctype switch is just not fine grained enough.
Saturday, August 12, 2006 6:34 AM by Chris Warner

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

@pd

For your information, this blog is powered by CommunityServer which, although written in ASP.NET, has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Most CommunityServer sites i've just had a quick look at all seem to validate okay, so maybe this is just an old version, or a simple mistake.

Chill your beans :)
Saturday, August 12, 2006 7:44 AM by portal-012 » IE7 Project Manager Responds To Critics

# portal-012 &raquo; IE7 Project Manager Responds To Critics

PingBack from http://technews.feedsreactor.com/?p=2017
Saturday, August 12, 2006 9:47 AM by David Hammond

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

@Chris Wilson

I forgot to mention: although there is a possibility that I wll begin constructing test pages for many of the bugs in my database, I have already submitted a number of bug reports to the Internet Explorer feedback system with simple and straight-forward test cases. I have been disappointed with the way the feedback system has been run, specifically how so many reports are marked as "By design" or "Won't fix" when, according to the explanations in the comments, they should have been filed as "Postponed" or simply switched from a "Bug" to "Suggestion". I'm trying to be as helpful as I can.
Saturday, August 12, 2006 10:03 AM by Tino Zijdel

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I think that as long as IE7 still has bugs and shortcomings on a fundamental level it can be justified to state that IE7 is somewhere between 50 and 60 on a scale of 1 to 100 where 100 equals full CSS2.1 support.
Besides inherit and the bugs that still remain in selectors you may add z-index ( http://therealcrisp.xs4all.nl/ie7beta/css_zindex.html ), layout rendering ( http://therealcrisp.xs4all.nl/ie7beta/css_relative_2.html ) and collapsing margins to the areas that still need a lot of attention and at this point will still require hacks and workarounds for developers such as myself.
Saturday, August 12, 2006 5:06 PM by Jaques P Sauvant

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I'm not the biggest fan of IE, but when my designs work in every common browser except IE, I think I shouldn't even bother with it.
Saturday, August 12, 2006 5:39 PM by Michael Stuart

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I would like to see IE (and all other browsers) have the ability to update their rendering engine & rules easily (like how you check for updates in Firefox).  This way, even after you release IE7, as you build in new fixes to the engine, those tested fixes could be updated in the browser as minor version updates without people having to wait who knows how long until IE version 8.  Please don't make us wait even a whole year after the release of IE7 for rendering improvements (which I consider just behind security patches as far as importance would go).  I wouldn't be concerned about having X number of IE7 versions to code a site for...just code for the very latest - those people are online already...just have IE check for the latest update and let them know there's a new update to install (like Firefox does).  I really like the direction of IE7 development so far!
Saturday, August 12, 2006 7:32 PM by Gérard Talbot

# Columnar layouts in CSS which fail in MSIE 6 and MSIE 7

Chris Wilson, you said
"(...) 'IE 6 and IE 7 failed to render even basic columnar layouts in CSS' in to solid work items, but I don't understand the problem - much of the web uses columnar layouts that work in IE."

This can not be completely true. A simple search+visit to many sites which show columnar layouts will demonstrate resistant/persistent CSS bugs in MSIE 7. You should also see/notice how much pain, sweat and frustration the people went through over the years to work around so many IE 5.x and IE 6 bugs. That is blatant+obvious to me.

http://www.info.com.ph/~etan/w3pantheon/style/abmh.html

http://www.info.com.ph/~etan/w3pantheon/style/modifiedsbmh.html

------

Examine carefully the .css files of this (Skidoo) document
Skidoo : 2 or 3 Column Layout
http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/skidoo/index.html
and you'll see at least 20 different kinds of CSS hacks aiming at IE 5+ in the Main stylesheets and Extra stylesheets.

------

Here is a page where MSIE 7 still fails while Opera 9, Firefox 1.5 and NS 7.0 succeed accordingly, as expected:

Test of Gallery Floats' bug in IE
http://awm.adsorption.org/prog/ex/galfloat.htm
(the last 2 of that page still fail in IE7b3)

------

Another page demonstrating IE7 bug is:

Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps
8. float columns (you have to click the tab "8")
http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/

------

It took me just 1-2 hours to find all these documents. You can find more "solid work items" on flaws/bugs in IE7 regarding columnar layouts if you care searching yourself. A good place to start is:

CssLayouts
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=CssLayouts

Gérard Talbot
Sunday, August 13, 2006 6:22 AM by MMarcus

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

> I recently worked a lot with DOM Events and its just
> a pain that IE does not support addEventListener...
> Ok, there are plenty of addEvent functions around
> but IMHO these are only workarounds. And I prefer
> the most standards compliant way, which would be
> addEventListener...

You may want to try this one:
http://en.design-noir.de/webdev/JS/addEvent/

Sure, it doesn't implement addEventListener. But at least you can use events in a somewhat standards compliant way.
Monday, August 14, 2006 1:03 AM by Christopher Parker

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I've read through as many comments as I could before my eyes started to glaze over. Basically, all I have to say is this: A majority of the market doesn't give you a license to play Web-god. There are standards and they exist for a reason. Web developers like me will stand for nothing short of 100% compliance with CSS1, CSS2, and CSS3. Do other browsers currently comply at such a level? No. Do they come close? Sort of. Are they striving toward this goal. Absolutely. Based on what I've read from Microsoft employees sofar, I can hardly say the same for IE.

Even if 100% standards compliance is reached with IE7, what about all of the other billions of people ineligible to upgrade, stuck with IE6? Release IE7 for older operating systems. These platform restrictions are ridiculous and only harmful to us, the users and developers of the Web.

As an example, Mozilla Firefox is written by volunteers. As is Konqueror. Standards support is leaps and bounds better in these two browsers than in M$IE, which is a browser written entirely by paid "professionals".

Not only should you be working on perfecting IE7 (you do owe it to us, after all), but you should be patching IE6 with these improvements, too.

"Converting as many people to Free/Libre Web browsers, one day at a time."
Monday, August 14, 2006 2:42 PM by Get A New Browser » Blog Archive » IE7 Standards Compliance, Again

# Get A New Browser &raquo; Blog Archive &raquo; IE7 Standards Compliance, Again

PingBack from http://getanewbrowser.com/2006/08/ie7-standards-compliance-again/
Monday, August 14, 2006 5:39 PM by Tino Zijdel

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

What exactly can we (webdevelopers) expect in terms of further improvements for CSS-support between now and the final release of IE7?

The fact that many bugreports are being put off as 'By Design' or 'Won't fix' don't sound promising given the fact that many are actually *bugs* and I would consider them 'blocking' for the release of a browser that aims to be more standards-compliant. Not being compliant with CSS2.1 at least on a level that competitive browsers are (we're not asking you to pass Acid2, just a simular level of compliance) will mean that developers still need to use hacks and workarounds to make pages look the same in IE7 as in other browsers. The bad thing is that IE7 as it looks now will need *different* hacks and workarounds than IE5 and/or IE6, adding to our workload and to the customer's bill.
IE7 (beta 3) still has fundamental flaws, bugs and shortcomings on the CSS-front (and we're not even mentioning ECMAScript or DOM-compliance here, fronts that have barely been touched in IE7 but are 5 years behind as well), and it also looks to me as if Trident is being patched up where it should actually have been rewritten from scratch.

I really do appreciate the effort that MS is making, but shipping IE7 as it is now when it comes to CSS-support would be a big mistake; it is only a half-finished product...
Monday, August 14, 2006 5:56 PM by Jim Pallett

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

have you looked at THIS VERY SITE in IE7 compared to FF, Opera?

the CSS for this site, with a page defending IE7's amazingly improved CSS functionality?

I'm typing this in IE7 right now, the calender at the top left encroaches into the main central column and the albatros image has an odd looking grey border to the right.

still, at least you pro-IE7 blog hosted on MSDN looks nice in OTHER browsers eh!
Monday, August 14, 2006 5:59 PM by Jim Pallett

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

had to post in firefox in the end, IE7 just sat there when i hit submit
Monday, August 14, 2006 6:01 PM by neil craig

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

i'd like to say that on the face of it, i am pleased with what i hear on the development of IE7. i don't use windows myself as i grew very tired of it's perpetual determination to remain backwards compatible to the point of awkwardness but as a web developer i have to account for IE on windows.

i've not been able to test IE7 myslef as for some reason the windows updater claims my install of xp at work is not valid when i know it is...however, thats another story...

the points i'd like to raise are as follows:

1. i really, really hope that IE7 will properly support the dimension properties of the box model and not expand widths and heights as the browser sees fit, ignoring my declarations. the same goes for min-height and min-width, these are fundamental properties which NEED to be fully functional.

2. i'd agree with many of the previous posters, the IE team need to make sure they keep on track in terms of not inventing too many proprietary features, IE is WAY too far behind for that right at the moment.

3. i absolutely applaud MS' efforts to become more standards compliant, standards are there for a reason, to ease the pain of people such as myself who develop on a favoured browser (in my case firefox due to its invaluable range of extensions). i just hope that the typical MS bravado/arrogance which i must say i see echoes of in chris' posts here (though to a much smaller extent than in years past) don't take over. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE recognise the power that MS has with IE and use that power responsibly for the better of everyone...make IE7 standards compliant and THEN innovate...we're all stuck with the legacy battles of IE6 and previous on a daily basis...the internet is now clearly the most important data medium on the planet and MS has the bulk of users on IE, be honest and don't abuse that fact and people will thank you for it. i think you guys are on the cusp of 'getting it'. open source software is a real inspiration, people making software for the common good...there's no dishonour in making a profit, just do it honestly, you seem to be almost on the right track, don't stop now...

apologies for the essay, just something i feel pretty strongly about...and i hope you are able  to take a few moments out to hear my opinion...

thanks and the best of luck to you.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 5:27 AM by todd

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Microsoft is simply putting most CSS improvements into the "too hard basket". MS priorities aren't to web developers. Even when they push IE7 to all XP users as they've planned through windows update, and gain a larger market share than Firefox, doesn't make it a better browser. Pretending IE hasn't got CSS/DOM/XHTML/JavaScript issues, reminds me of the 'see/speak/hear no evil monkeys'.

Microsoft has 4 options

* Re-write IE (unlikely)

* License gecko/other browser maybe?

* Do nothing, stay with the current code and see no great improvements.

* Open source trident (ha)

Accept you have rendering problems, and start addressing them, now.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 7:53 AM by Jim Pallett

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

i just dont think MS understand (or dont care) how much faith we have lost in IE over the last few years.

lets say you made a car which exploded every time you went over a 10cm bump.

contractors went round frantically filling in holes in the road, and on average, everyone was safe. Occasionally, someone purposely wouldnt fill in the holes on their driveway just in protest to the car manufacturers.

even though other cars had been known to explode. You could drive them into a wall if your tried - over a mine field - lots of things would blow it up, none of these we nearly as big an issue as this one.

eventually, they announced a new model with lots of improvements. It has a new look, new anti-theft devices, GPS, and they were going to force update this car to everyone it was so good.
When they eventually made an announcement about the explosion issue they said "Fixed - now it wont explode unless you drive over a bump higher than 18cm : thats a VAST improvement"

how many road surfacers would...well...just kill themselves there and then?

Tuesday, August 15, 2006 10:27 AM by cj

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

i'm another person who had high hopes for the bug reporting system but gave up after seeing so many "won't fixes" or "by designs" on issues i cared about.

with many fixes (yay!) in ie7, i know you think you've made great strides, and in many ways you have.  on the other hand, though, you "broke" some of our work-arounds for ie6 but didn't give us any way to fix them in ie7.  one big example in my own experience is containing divs that contain floats.  a wonderful method for containing a float uses :after (which ie7 doesn't support [bug report #54017]) and then a hack for ie6, along the following lines:

.menu:after {
clear: both;
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
visibility: hidden;
}

/* bs hoop for ie \*/
* html .menu {height: 0;}/* */

there are a few others (such as "display: table/table-cell"), but containing floats is a very big deal, at least for me.

i'll be honest and say i've hated ie for years, but my pages display better than i thought they would with no ie7 hacks, so you must be on the right track.  :)  if you'd like demo pages of the various places my pages break in ie7, let me know.

i appreciate the ie team's willingness to start working on the browser, and i'll keep my fingers crossed that it'll be enough to lessen the load of ie6 (eventually, anyway) while not adding too many extra hack-arounds!

[ps - as always, please, please, please at least think about letting us have ie6 and ie7 on the same dang machine so we can test side-by-side without a virtual machine.  i think you guys fail to realize that most computers at work aren't state-of-the-art and just don't have the ram for that.]

Tuesday, August 15, 2006 10:36 AM by Tino Zijdel

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

cj: the most easy and logical way to have a container-element enclose your floats is to give the containing element an overflow: auto or overflow: hidden ;) (also works in IE6 and IE7 after having been fixed since it was broken in beta 1)
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 11:03 AM by Levente

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I think most of us is scared that after IE7 the next version will come after another 5 years. It's good that you fixed some bugs, but that's not enough. Don't stop improving IE!
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 12:20 PM by cj

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

@tino

that only works well *if* you are ok with scrollbars appearing in your pages or content being hidden, neither of which my bosses would be ok with.  ;)  the only scrollbar we want is the one the browser provides, and they for sure do not want content disappearing, i can guarantee that!
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 2:04 PM by Gérard Talbot

# Basic columnar layouts fail in IE7; new plans for IE 7.x and IE 8

Mr Wilson,

Jim Pallett is absolutely right. If you carefully examine this very blog page of yours, you'll see several differences in the way IE7 renders this page... and this meets exactly your quest about basic columnar layout which break in IE7.

"the calender at the top left encroaches into the main central column and the albatros image has an odd looking grey border to the right."

Jim Pallet is entirely correct here. Opera 9.01, Firefox 1.5.0.6, Amaya 9.5 and NS 7.0 all
- do not have a grey looking border to the right, between the left column and the main (content) central column
- do not have the calendar (right column) encroaches into the main central column

Yesterday, I spent 2 hours searching for CSS 1 and CSS 2.1 testcases which fails in IE 7. In 2 hours, I was able to find 25! (I will upload this into a webpage at my site at

http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs/CWilsonMSIE7AndCSSCompliance.html#SolidTestcasesWouldHelp

). I want to insist that these 25 testcases come from Ian "Hixie" Hickson CSS evil tests and that I take no credit, 0 credit for the testcases.

IMO, Microsoft needs to

- put a development team entirely on an entirely new rendering engine and entirely new browser (interface) (IE 8). With everything on the table:
 o sufficient technical, financial, human resources, etc.
 o drop support for backward-compatibility (legacy)
 o drop doctype switching (there should be only 1 rendering mode, always standards-compliant rendering mode)
 o develop a 4 year roadmap, schedule with goals to achieve: and make it public!
 o develop your own testcases based on the actual, real webpage designs existing on the web
 o improve your Expression Web Design software to go hand-to-hand with your long-term IE 8 browser
 o develop a web-standards evangelism team during that 4 years period. Even try to join with W3C, webstandards.org, Opera, Mozilla.org on creating that team. So that, eventually, the transition will be gradual, progressive and won't hurt everyone
 o create a 4 year plan where IE 8 would be HTML 4.01 compliant, CSS 2.1 compliant, DOM 3 compliant, UAAG 1.0 compliant, etc. Aiming at/striving for 100% compliancy.

- release minor/major upgrades to IE 7 for the next 4 years. Just forget about satisfying all of the web authors during those 4 years. Eg IE 7.1 should fix remaining/more CSS bugs (which does not require underlying os improvements) and have as many minor improvements as possible.

- IE 7.1 (and IE 8) should have the same feature that M. Gueury developed for Firefox 1.x: a true SGML parser (based on OpenSP), just like the W3C validator uses, and HTML Tidy.

http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/index.html

http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/preview_080.html

Thanks to a single right-click, users and developers would know where are the errors in their webpage. With a right-click, they could fix some errors, or go to the W3C validation online.

- Explain publicly what are your plans. A lot of us knew well in 2001-2002 that Opera had 2 projects, one being to develop Opera 7 (DOM 2 Events compliant) while also fixing, improving Opera 6.x. Same thing with Netscape/Mozilla and its NS 6. At one point, they knew they had to rewrite entirely the rendering engine. They went through a lot of criticisms when NS 6.0 beta 1, beta 2, beta 3 and NS 6.01 were released but eventually NS 7.x browser releases were excellent ones.

Gérard Talbot
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 3:31 PM by Gérard Talbot

# C. Wilson, IE7 and CSS compliance

Mr Wilson,

You wanted something better than bitching and moaning and you got that during 20 months from web authors, web standards advocates with all kinds of links, testcases, ideas, suggestions, constructive feedbacks, relevant quotes, concrete examples, demo pages, etc. in wiki-channel9 webpages.  And you still got all of that in your very own personal blog. You were given explanations and useful replies, etc. on each/all of your demands/requests.

I fully understand the mistrust of many posters, their irritations, exasperations, the intensity of their frustrations, the depth of their resentment. And I do share their perspective, feelings.

http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs/CWilsonMSIE7AndCSSCompliance.html

Gérard Talbot
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 3:35 PM by ceasar

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I have one question for you all.

If IE7 will be fully "Compliance" then every webdesigner will be a lucky guy or girl.

But what will happen then with the old sites scripted for smaller and larger compagnies with all the far from perfect styles
I have seen a lot of old cms systems for large compagnies only made for IE with bad scripting.

Will they still work ?
Otherwise a lot of compagnies in the world will have a lot of trouble getting there.

Then these large compagnies ( like government sites ) are all paying there bills to microsoft so when IE7 will to good to be true these large compagnies will all be in trouble.

So I think IE7 is very hard to set up.
First it need to render the latest correct code but also it has to support the old crappy code.

Just a thought :)
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 4:30 PM by pilmore, lee » Oh for f###s sake MS…

# pilmore, lee &raquo; Oh for f###s sake MS&#8230;

PingBack from http://www.pilmore.co.uk/2006/08/15/oh-for-fs-sake-ms/
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 5:52 PM by bh6507

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Absolute and fixed positioning are still broken in IE7. In IE6, we at least had a work around by using padding to fake it. That of course was taking advantage of another IE6 defect related to the box model.  Well, the box model has been "fixed" and the work around is now gone. There is no way to even fake absolute positioning in IE7.

See: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=60560

How about at least fixing the partial CSS2 support already in the browser?
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 4:35 AM by Kalsta

# re: Snarky snarky.

Re. http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/15/701894.aspx

Chris, I think most developers will understand your anger and frustration. You and your team know better than anyone the technical (and corporate?) hurdles you face, and when you've worked your ass off to overcome these hurdles it's hard not to take 'uninformed or unrealistic' comments personally.

But please understand the anger from the other side ... As web developers we are never afforded the luxury of telling our clients, 'Sorry, I know your website doesn't work quite right in Internet Explorer, but we did the best we can. We hope to fix the most glaring issues by sometime next year.'

Please understand how angry I feel when my kids haven't seen me all week and I've worked through another night to make my CSS layout work in IE6 -- hours and hours of work that I will never be paid for. Multiply this experience by thousands and thousands of web developers world-wide (I often imagine them suffering as I do!) and you see why Microsoft has such a solemn duty to put whatever resources are necessary to fix this sinking ship once and for all (or else admit defeat and start shipping Windows with a copy of Firefox.)

This anger is not the kind that reacts to a snarky comment or two. This is the kind of anger you feel when someone threatens your livelihood and your freedom. Yes, I use the word freedom, because I confess to feeling like a prisoner held against my will by the necessity to work with IE.

Morally at least, I do believe we have a right to demand nothing short of on-par compliance with the likes of Firefox and Safari. While Microsoft makes it's billions and your development team takes home a guaranteed salary, for small business people like myself our productivity defines our income. Resource cutting by Microsoft in the development of IE multiples millions of times over in the pockets and lives of real people and their families the world over.

Anyway, I could go on, but I've made my point as best I can in the limited time I don't have. Time to play with the kids.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 5:43 AM by Dilip Kumar

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I think Microsoft should acquire Opera and merge the code with its IE base.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 7:07 AM by Seth

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

I've been a project manager in this field since 1996 and have seen through a lot of web development - everything from banners and microsites, to large corporate brochureware sites to complex web-based applications.

I've been following the comments here, at Digg, and at ArsTechnica, and I'm surprised by the active voice of the developer community that develops for other browsers first and then apparently seems to hack their code to get it to work with IE. The reason I'm surprised is that nearly every developer I have ever worked with uses IE as their primary browser so the sites they code start out working in IE and then they have to hack the code to get it to work in Firefox, then in Safari, then in Opera.

And honestly, that's the way it should happen - only because IE still holds a dominant position in the marketplace, despite our distaste for it, despite its apparent lack of standards compliance. I don't use IE as my primary web browser, but when I look at the logs from clients - and here I'm referring to top global brands - the average usage for IE is still well above 90% across the sites I've worked on. And at the firms where I've worked, any developer knows that the primary browser that has to be supported has to be what the audience is using, first, and then we can satisfy our compliance and other aspirational needs.

There have been many times when my teams have worked on developing a site on a codebase that just renders like crap in Firefox. Why? Because they use IE and I generally use Firefox; and don't even go there with Safari because during development cycles when I come home and check out work in Safari on my Mac, the sites often look like crap. And it takes a long time and a lot of hacking to get it to work right.

Seems to me that it's not just Microsoft that needs to improve support to be more standards compliant, but all browsers. I once thought that the W3C should trademark their compliance standards, maybe even the phrase "web browser", and they would officially license compliance confirmations and the term "web browser" to any application that passed a standard set of tests across the various standards. At least then we could have some reasonably good assurance that the browser itself, and not *our* code, is compliant. (Although code compliance is also important.)

Wednesday, August 16, 2006 7:52 AM by Tino Zijdel

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

Seth: you are clearly one of those 'new amateurs' that haven't kept themselves up to date with recent developments.
When you think that first creating something to work with sub-optimal pseudo-standards and then 'hacking' it to get it right in browsers that actually follow the real standards is a bit strange at the least. The real danger lies in the fact that some of the developers with that mindset don't even bother to make their IE-optimised site accessible to other browsers.

The question should not be "how many of my users use IE?" (a percentage that is still dropping - on the site I work for it is already below 50%) but "how do I make my site accessible to everyone?" and that is partly what webstandards is about.
Coding a public website for a specific browser is just bad practice. Actually you are lucky that Microsoft so fiercely holds on to backwards-compatibility (which is partly responsible for the fact that IE *cannot* be made fully standards-compatible) else you would be having a hell of a job getting your sites right when IE7 hits the market...
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 8:13 AM by Robshocka

# re: IE and CSS "Compliance"

We've been subjugated to IE's mediocrity for so long we don't care about your problems in development Wilson, we already have our own to deal with. So excuse us for not sympathizing that IE7 will still keep IE in the worst modern browser a person can use category.

If IE had been kept on the up and up for the last 10 years you wouldn't be having a rough time, so don't cry to us. Cry to those who came before you that left you such a mess for you to clean up.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 8:41 AM by AT