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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

Published Friday, July 29, 2005 8:22 PM by ieblog

Comments

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:45 PM by Kim Scarborough
I hope that you'll retain font embedding even if you're shooting for CSS 2.1 compliance.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:46 PM by Sam
Sounds great!

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:46 PM by kfarmer
Out of curiosity (since I'm not familiar with the bug names you list), is something going to be done about the layering of DHTML popups over combo controls and the like. I'm sure you've seen it -- the controls in question live permanently in a layer above the pop-up, making for poor co-existance between DHTML menus and forms.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:46 PM by Jim
That's *fantastic* Chris! This is exactly the sort of post I've been hoping for ever since the IE Blog first started. Thank you!

The selection of further support you have chosen seems reasonable enough, you've certainly covered the extremely annoying and incomprehensible bugs that tend to completely screw up a website.

The major style thing that is currently lacking that is extremely useful and widely implemented is CSS tables. Would it be possible to implement those too? The major scripting thing would be the DOM event model. One extremely simple thing to add (i.e. a five minute job) would be the new media types for ECMAScript.

> Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

This completes your support for CSS 1.0, doesn't it?

> 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

Would it be possible to make this list public?

Please keep posting like this. It doesn't matter if it's merely to say "we definitely won't be implementing [x]", so long as we know one way or the other.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:53 PM by Jim
Just to add to my previous comment, if you implement the new ECMAScript media types, that means we can hide scripts from Internet Explorer 6 and below without any browser checking or non-standard hacks.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Friday, July 29, 2005 11:56 PM by Markus [MSFT]
@Jim

Yes, background-attachement: fixed was the last thing we were aware of. If you guys know of anything else missing form CSS1 please post it here.

Thanks
-- Markus

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:06 AM by Jim
Markus,

Just remembered a few things:

Specificity is screwed up somewhere when dealing with lists. I never bothered to debug it fully, because I can usually work around it by cramming a load of specificity into the selectors I use. Are you aware of this issue?

The forward-compatible parsing of CSS 1 requires you to ignore certain things in error conditions that you do not (or was this fixed in 6.0?).

Stylesheets served as something other than text/css still get processed - although this is an HTTP bug, not a CSS bug per se. If you fix this, it would let us serve stylesheets to Internet Explorer 6.0 and below, but not Internet Explorer 7+.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:07 AM by Sean
Very encouraging.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:16 AM by Chris Wilson [MS]
Actually, Jim, I don't think I've ever seen a specificity problem with lists. If you can find an example, we can take a look.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:18 AM by snowknight
I like those lists. No, I *really* like those lists. I hope they get bigger before beta 2.

"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. [....] 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."

I think most, if not all, web developers won't have a problem with this. Recent Firefox nightlies don't render it right, so I don't honestly expect IE 7 to render it completely correct.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:23 AM by Jim
> Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback

One thing that the <object> element type doesn't really address is how to signal to the user that a fallback has been used.

In some cases, an author would want to have a "silent" fallback, for example, where a video is available in Ogg Theora and MPEG formats.

In other cases, an author would want some kind of "you aren't getting the best experience" notification, for example where a Flash presentation is available with a PNG screenshot fallback.

Would it be possible to include some mechanism to allow authors to say which is more suitable? For example:

<meta name="object-fallback" content="silent">

In the cases where notification is suitable, you can put the notice in the yellow bar, and in the other cases, you can just silently use the fallback.

Please do this in a way that doesn't conflict with valid code though, traditionally, you tend to do it in such a way as to make it impossible to use it in valid pages, e.g. invalid attributes.

Exposing to scripts whether a fallback was used would also be useful.

This is a wishlist item though, further HTML, CSS, DOM and HTTP improvements are far more welcome.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:27 AM by Brandon
I would like to note, that I would like to see this in IE. The autoscroll image http://tinypic.com/9kxw83.png looks terrible, do you really think that looks like a final product? Also maybe some form of a download manager, or more than 2 downloads at once implemented? Some users live in a broadband world where you can handle more than 2 downloads!

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:28 AM by Jim
Next time I run across the list specificity problem, I'll whip up a test case.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:33 AM by minghong
What about HTML q element? It should be very easy to support that.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:42 AM by Nanobot
Thank you. This is what I wanted to hear. Many of what I consider necessities are not mentioned on your list, but I'm much happier now that you're actually making progress.

I do want to remind you guys, though, that IE won't be forgiven so easily. Many web developers think of Microsoft as a company who will do the bare minimum just to make their customers content enough to stay with them. So even if you do make considerable progress and bring IE near where other browsers are at, many of us will still question your long-term commitment. I would ask that you promise us that you won't let IE's standards support development ever fall stagnant like IE6 again, but I understand that, as a business, you aren't in much of a position to make such long-term promises. Instead, I just want you to keep it in mind: web developers don't trust Microsoft's commitment anymore, and unless you work your butt off to please them, they maybe never will. Doing a minimal job will not work this time.

That said, I really hope to get a pleasant surprize come IE7. I'm personally sticking with Firefox, but as long as the majority population is using something that reasonably complies with standards, I'll be happy.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:42 AM by Jonathan Fenocchi
I'd like to know if IE7 will support the * html { ... } selector still. This selector isn't supported in other browsers, and it's what lets us differentiate between browsers in a lot of cases. If this is changed in IE7 and not supported (or, you might say fixed, since technically I guess supporting this would be considered a bug), many existing sites that rely on this bug will cease to display properly, unless IE7 fixes all of the bugs with web page formatting (such as the box model).

One other thing, will border-style: dotted be supported in IE7?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:45 AM by Kunal Kundaje
This post just made me smile, Chris. It really did. :)
A big thank you to you and your team for the work you folks are putting in. Keep the momentum going!

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:45 AM by Jug
Great news, and I like that you intend to keep up with your efforts with CSS 2.1!

This article would be hilarious to read the comments to if it was posted on Slashdot.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:49 AM by Nanobot
Jim: Maybe I'm not following what you mean, but Couldn't you do something like this:

<!-- Silent -->
<object type="video/x-something" data="foo.v1">
<object type="video/x-another" data="foo.v2">
</object>
</object>

<!-- Not best experience -->
<object type="video/x-something" data="foo.v1">
<img src="foo.png" alt="Foobar">
<p>Your user agent cannot display this video correctly. Above is a screenshot.</p>
</object>

Also, I sure hope they don't add more proprietary features. That's the last thing we want. If you want to propose something new, do it through the W3C.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:50 AM by Soulhuntre
"I do want to remind you guys, though, that IE won't be forgiven so easily."

Well, lets be honest. Most of the people making the most noise will >never< forgive MS simply because it >is< MS. Their whole personal self image is defined by how rebellious they are and how they can read /. and "stick it to the corporations!" by pirating movies and complaining about MS.

MS could ship perfect CSS2 support and they would complain it isn't Firefox "bug compatible", that it doesn't retro-install into Windows 3.1. For an encore they would complain that because a fully compliant browser is in Windows that they need to fire up the whole monopoly machinery again because they can't compete anymore on features.

Jealous hatred never ends.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:50 AM by minghong
> Yes, background-attachement: fixed was the last
> thing we were aware of. If you guys know of
> anything else missing form CSS1 please post it
> here.
>
> Thanks
> -- Markus

Definately. font-weight is not correct when it is set to 600.

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/tests/iewin_fontweight.html

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 12:54 AM by minghong
> One thing that the <object> element type
> doesn't really address is how to signal to the
> user that a fallback has been used.

No, you can try something like this:

<object type="image/svg+xml" data="example.svg">
<p>You are not viewing SVG</p>
<object type="image/png" data="example.png">
<p>You can't view image</p>
</object>
</object>

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:00 AM by minghong
And also, "blink" in text-decoration is not currently supported (I guess it should be in CSS1, right).

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:04 AM by Alijah Green
i am a end user and if this lack in anyway of innovation then you will lose. it is a fact.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:10 AM by Fiery Kitsune
*Loud applause*

Chris! Thank you so much for that down-to-earth and informative blog post.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:16 AM by mjb
This is great news; thanks for posting and for working on those CSS bugs.

Is there any hope of IE7 supporting the application/xml+xhtml and application/xml+xslt media types?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:25 AM by Jim
Nanobot, minghong: Doh! I can't believe I've never thought of (or seen) that before! Thanks.

> "blink" in text-decoration is not currently supported

Is that really a bad thing? ;) It's an optional part of the specs anyway.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:32 AM by Jim
> Is there any hope of IE7 supporting the application/xml+xhtml and application/xml+xslt media types?

I'd guess XHTML support is very unlikely - it won't affect as many people as HTML/CSS/DOM/HTTP updates, and it's a bigger job than many people realise. It's not simply a case of adding a media type to a list and failing on malformed documents. There are changes to the DOM, changes to CSS, etc that also have to be added.

On the off-chance you guys are considering it - please don't. Anne van Kesteren's suggestion for an Internet Explorer that can follow the specs 100% and still render old websites with quirks is a great idea, and I hope you guys will consider it for Internet Explorer 8 - implementing a buggy application/xhtml+xml will ruin any chance of it working though.

# Web Developers will see results in IE7 Beta 2

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:34 AM by Brian Goldfarb's Blog
Today, Chris Wilson spilled the beans I've been wanting to spill for awhile --&amp;nbsp; The majority of...

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:35 AM by Rosyna
The Acid2 test is also an ERROR checking test. To see how well a browser deals with malformed HTML/CSS in strict mode. Not handling errors correctly can also cause huge problems on web pages. The Acid2 test is just some of the errors that could occur. As it is now, I think only Safari (webkit) tip of the tree passes Acid2 now. (Well, and KHTML).

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:38 AM by bob-omb
>MS could ship perfect CSS2 support and they would complain it isn't Firefox "bug compatible", that it doesn't retro-install into Windows 3.1.

Soulhuntre, I have no doubt that some people would hate Microsoft even if it went open source, implemented every webstandard perfectly, fixed every security flaw and stbility problem in windows, and bought them a car. Still, give them a little more credit than that.

They wouldn't want IE to conform to Firefox bugs. If anything, they'd just find something else to legitimately complain about. Or perhaps they'd try to fix more bugs in Firefox and then complain that IE doesn't do that properly (nevermind that Firefox didn't either, a week ago).

As for Windows 3.1, they wouldn't care, because anyone who hates Microsoft that much is running Linux or OS X.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:49 AM by Philippe
From css1, a little thing come to mind: font-size inheritance in tables.

Also, support for the keyword 'inherit'.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 1:51 AM by Jim
> The Acid2 test is also an ERROR checking test. To see how well a browser deals with malformed HTML/CSS in strict mode.

It contains CSS errors to determine if a browser follows the error handling defined by the CSS specifications. It doesn't contain HTML errors, because there is no defined error handling for HTML, so there's nothing to check.

> As it is now, I think only Safari (webkit) tip of the tree passes Acid2 now. (Well, and KHTML).

The latest iCab beta does as well.

> Soulhuntre, I have no doubt that some people would hate Microsoft even if it went open source, implemented every webstandard perfectly, fixed every security flaw and stbility problem in windows, and bought them a car.

Bear in mind that once upon a time, IBM were just as bad as Microsoft ever was, but IBM have pretty much redeemed themselves and are now the "good guys". They've done a lot less to earn their credibility than you are saying Microsoft would have to do.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:12 AM by Steven
This is certainly good to see. Seems you've addressed the most important issues.

Main things left over from my wish list:
- support for min-height/min-width (and correspondingly: height/width, which currently seem to act as min-height/min-width should)

- support for :before and :after selectors, especially in combination with the "content" property (which may already be covered in the item "CSS 2.1 Selector support")

The progress you have already made goes a long way to resolving my IE headaches. If the above points make it in, too, I'll be a very happy camper indeed.

Thanks for finally giving some details in addressing the concerns we've expressed here over the past few months.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:23 AM by Rosyna
Jim, it has an HTML comment error.

<div class="parser-container"><div class="parser"><!-- -- --->ERROR<!- ------ ></div></div> <!-- two dashes is what delimits a comment, so the text "->ERROR<!-" earlier on this line is actually part of a comment -->

# Wow!

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:24 AM by Robert Nyman
Wow, this really is good news! But why the secrecy, why didn'tyou let us know this until know?

Support for the correct DOM event handling and the application/xhtml+xml MIME type are the only two things I cant think of right now that's missing from that list.

Any possibility that you will have any release in the future that will work in Windows XP prior to SP 2 or Windows 2000 (not likely, I know, but one's gotta ask)?

An updated review can be found at http://www.robertnyman.com/2005/07/28/ie-7-beta-1-a-first-glance/

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:25 AM by Masklinn
Thank you Chris.
Really, thank you.

> And also, "blink" in text-decoration is not currently supported (I guess it should be in CSS1, right).
Well, I myself wouldn't rank that as a "bad thing", less blinkage = more surfage

> It contains CSS errors to determine if a browser
> follows the error handling defined by the CSS specifications.
> It doesn't contain HTML errors, because there is no
>defined error handling for HTML, so there's nothing to check.
That couldn't be more wrong, Acid2 does contain HTML errors checks, at least for HTML comments-handling errors

> many existing sites that rely on this bug will cease to display properly,
> unless IE7 fixes all of the bugs with web page formatting (such as the box model).
WTF? box model has been fixed in Strict mode ever since IE6, if you still have to hack for the box model in IE6 then you don't know anything and you don't have the qualifiquations to whine in this blog
( ;) )
This selector should now work in strict mode, and I hope it doesn't since it'll probably be unneeded

> I do want to remind you guys, though, that IE won't be forgiven so easily.
The only reason they won't is because IE6 is alive and kicking and the non support for running IE6 in W2K will give the former quite a long lifetime left.

If IE7 complies to the web-crew demands only the ones that are full of hate won't forgive.

The reason why (quite a lot of) people currently loathe MS is because they keep the web from going forward and painfully toughen people's jobs... if they stop doing that we'll be happy.


As a side note to the IE team:
1- Will the HTTP Accept header be tuned to reflect the true capacities of IE7?
2- Will we see any modification in DHTML/DOM Apis
3- Would xmlHttpRequest be avaible as a standalone object instead of an ActiveX?
4- application/xhtml+xml? pretty please?

Anyway, thanks again for your work and thanks for this list, the only thing I regret now is that you didn't disclose it earlier, and didn't tell anything to the community, which triggered the reactions to the previous IE7blog posts. Unlock the Black Box and let us see inside, we probably won't harm you and may damn well help. (it'd help Molly's sanity too, I think)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:27 AM by Steve Walker
Will overflow in <tbody> be supported?

# Now you know!

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:30 AM by Dave Massy's WebLog
If you have been wondering what IE7 will do for web developers then take a look at Chris Wilson's post...

# Pixel font resizing

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:39 AM by Peter Akkies
How about pixel font resizing? Whenever a font size is specified in pixels, it won't resize in IE6. Is this fixed in IE7? I surely hope so!

I am really happy with this post and it really shows that you guys are ready to commit! ;)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 2:55 AM by Steffen Weber
Two things that really annoy me on MSIE:
1) If you click on a label of a checkbox, radio button or the like this should be treated like a click on the checkbox itself.
2) Dropdown menus (select tags) are always on top, you cannot make anything appear above them. (Yes I know, because they use native widgets, but that´s a poor explanation!)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 3:02 AM by Jim
> Jim, it has an HTML comment error.

> That couldn't be more wrong, Acid2 does contain HTML errors checks, at least for HTML comments-handling errors

Guys, check it again. That's not an error. The idea is that broken user-agents will think ERROR is part of the content, thus displaying the text ERROR. Conformant user-agents will understand that ERROR is part of the comment and will not display it. It's not an error in the markup, the text ERROR is there to show when a user-agent has made a parsing error.

# Tan Hack

Saturday, July 30, 2005 3:24 AM by Martijn ten Napel
I hope that, given the fix list, you will make sure that IE7 won't support the Tan hack (the famous '* html') otherwise we will be feeding our IE5 and 6 workarounds to IE7.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 3:40 AM by Fiery Kitsune
iCab
Safari
Konqueror

All have passed Acid2 if you the latest builds.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:05 AM by Mike J
One thing hasn’t mentioned too much is the conflictive zooming strategy. There are two type of conflicts: 1) For IE itself. IE’s Text Size is one kind of zooming function, which works for some sites, but does not work on others, such as the site: http://www.quirksmode.org/ , no effect when you change the Text Size. The other function is DHTML style.zoom function. Also it works for some sites but does not work “properly” on others due to complicated layout. That makes me difficult to supply a simple Ctrl+ ‘+’ and Ctrl+’-‘ for the zooming function in our tabbed browser.
2) This zooming difference between different browsers, such as IE and FireFox. NO STANDARD. You can try by using Ctrl+MouseWheelScroll.
Because the screen resolution varies a lot, some site’s text is too small to read. How can we supply a simple and unified way let user to use?

Also, in DHTML style.zoom, the text is not rendered properly.

Mike J

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:08 AM by John A. Bilicki III
Here is the good and bad...

Security SHOULD NOT be a concern but the chair is physically melded to the table because of the prior need to kill off Netscape... Had Microsoft not molded IE in to the OS and forced companies creating ActiveX controls to go through a screening process I would not be charging 85 dollars to remove 500 pieces of spyware from her 5 month old computer (yes she has SV1).

Chris's post does however shed some light in the very dark areas of MSIE's existence. Head banging errors ARE most important and ACID testing is ~NOT~ mission critical. I'm using a Gecko build from last week, Opera 8.01 (8.02 is out at the moment) and I have yet to see ANY browser pass the Acid 2 test.

I will be banning all MSIE versions below 7 as soon as 7 is released and making my site both fully XHTML 1.1 and work with full AAA accessabilities standards in mind.

Testing MSIE7 I am disappointed at some initial GUI changes.

Tabbed browsing is ALWAYS on by default. Honestly this feature is only really useful for MAC users who obnoxiously have no taskbar (total pain in the ass on a MAC) and tabbed browsing (while it should be on by default in IE7) is not needed to be always showing.

There are WAY too many buttons in IE6. There are NO buttons in IE7...just a left and right button?

Buttons should be made available..
Back, forward, stop, refresh, home | Favorites, History, Print

The favorite's Link toolbar isn't on or available.

Things I'd like to see from MSIE as far as GUI enhancements...

Something implemented to clean up the THOUSANDS of junk bookmarks just blatantly DUMPED in to IE's favorites. People are unorganized enough as it is. They will not embrace technology if others are deciding what their personal settings are set to...they must set their preferences, not programs their kids installed.

Where is the GO button? Non-technical people do not use their keyboards for anything but typing in the address bar for example.

If there are important things you folks are working on (such as :hover) that drive us crazy don't keep us waiting for the end of the world. Delaying the prosperity of technology until competition fires up is not something the history books will embrace MS for.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:17 AM by dnl2ba
Great news! Thanks for keeping us up to speed.

> 1) If you click on a label of a checkbox, radio
> button or the like this should be treated like
> a click on the checkbox itself.

In my universe, this works fine in IE6 if you use an ID attribute on the form control and an identical value for the FOR attribute on the label.

> I will be banning all MSIE versions below 7
> as soon as 7 is released and making my site
> both fully XHTML 1.1 and work with full AAA
> accessabilities standards in mind.

Please keep in mind:

1) Many corporate users are stuck with older versions because IT departments can be very conservative (who knows what intranet apps the new version might not work in, plus non-standard configs are a pain to support).

2) You better believe Grandma will see few reasons to upgrade to IE7. IE7 will probably see a slow uptake similar to IE6's.

3) Only WinXP SP2 and Vista users will even have the option of installing IE7. There are still many people (especially business users) on Win2K, and even some people using Win9x.

"Accessibility" for people using special browsers (screen readers, mobile devices) at the expense of millions of IE5.x and IE6 users is not very good accessibility.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:22 AM by John A. Bilicki III
Also...

To the person requesting more then two downloads being allowed at once... MS ~IS~ following a standard (which is the HTTP standard) which states that there should not be more then two active connections at once to any given server.

Paste this in to a file with a REG extension to overcome the two file download limit (but be aware that this does not follow the HTTP standard...

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=dword:00000020
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000010

# MSHTML editing

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:27 AM by Robert Nyman
By the way, is there any chance that the version of MSHTML in IE 7 will generate strict correct code? Quotes on attributes, lower-case tags, well-formedness etc etc?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:30 AM by Xepol
Yes, this is a great post. It finally gives details we all want (unlike the doc file which is suppose to say what is in B1 but really just gives vauge promises about what may or may not be in b2).

Glad to see the MS team active not just in the blogs but the comments. You can't imagine how reassuring it is to see the MS team actually leaving comments replying to comments! SOMEONE IS LISTENING!!! (Although the very on-topic blog messages kinda give it away, actual participation in the convo goes that extra mile!)

On the topic of security, again : Passwords on settings and downloads and installing active X controls -> Help me secure my machine from kids, employees, my friend bob who THINKS he's an expert etc etc etc all of it. If you put the right security tools in our hands, it will REALLY help. (imagine how many times I would not have had to reinstall my kid's machine if he couldn't download EVERYTHING on the planet)

Soulhuntre : Glad someone else gets it, sadly, no one loves a winner. I personally liked how Netscape bitched about MS's monopoly while Netscape still had 80+% of the market. Maybe if they had focused on a quality product, they wouldn't have lost all that ground to a relative new comer in the market.

Hopefully, that lesson isn't lost of MS. Just glad firefox is there to re-invigorate MS's IE efforts, because it is definitely needed.

- Xepol

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:31 AM by Mike Weller
>> we’ve planned out what we can and can’t do in IE7.

Any chance of getting a list of things you can't do then?

# IEBlog: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:47 AM by Virtuelvis
Chris Wilson is talking about which CSS bugs Microsoft are planning to fix for IE7 beta 2.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 4:48 AM by Faruk Ateş
Excellent news! I've updated my post to reflect this:

http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2005/07/28/ie7-beta-1-release


Chris & IE Team:
I am wondering, with the quirky percentages, are you talking about the fact that IE can't divide by 2? Case: using a background image on the body to 'fake' a full-height column layout, but having it be 1 pixel off depending on the size of the scrollbar (17px makes it off, 18 doesn't, etc.)

Also, are you guys aware of this issue:
http://kurafire.net/log/archive/2005/06/27/floating-labels-ie6?highlight=ie

I've had IE crash on text resizes for a while, but then after a restart we couldn't reproduce it. It was narrowed down to left-floated labels with a specific width, and a certain order of CSS properties. This order, however, I can't reproduce. :(

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 5:11 AM by Andy
This is great, it is nice to see that so many of the issues will be resolved, at least for those who can upgrade.

What I'm wondering is how the changes in CSS handling will affect the hacks that are currently being used.

It would be useful to know if any of the hacks that we currently employ to make things IE only, or non-IE only will do anything unintended in IE7; for example, if a hack still works to correct positioning, but the positioning no longer needs correction are we going to see an over compensation the other way?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 5:15 AM by David Naylor
I love you guys! If I had the money I'd come over to the US and kiss your feet!

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 5:26 AM by Nath
Good to see such a candid post on what's going on.

A comment though: The requirement to have the OS verified and SP2/winXP is a bit rich: this sort of thing reenforces microsoft as the "big bad ogre". There is no reason at all that IE couldn't be separate from the OS (it's called good software engineering), and certainly shouldn't be forcing users to run validation routines for other software products (i.e. the operating system) just to install. There are no other browsers that enforce this.

On a similar note: with MSN messenger can you make it so that IE being online won't affect anything but web browsing? I would like to be able to have IE in offline mode while still able to use MSN messenger (this prevents other applications popping up URLs)..

Those things aside: keep up the posting on how things are progressing..

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 5:39 AM by Jalenack
John A. Bilicki III,

If you are making your site fully AAA compliant, you won't be banning ANY browser. That bugged me a little bit..

Anyhoo, this is fantastic news. I've been irregularly following this blog and this is the first post I've really gotten a "woohoo!!" feeling out of. I'm very familiar with the bang-your-head-on-desk feeling when working in IE, and this is certainly good news for my desk!

# Star selector hack

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:00 AM by Chris H
Thanks for this post Chris, it has certainly put my mind to rest that the IE team are serious about upping their standards game. I have to admit from previous posts, I had started to lose faith.

Could I ask though, if you'll be doing anything (or have indeed dome something) with the star selector hack - where by:

* html body div {
width: 100px;
height: 200px;
}

... is only read by current IE browsers?

For example, if it were to remain, along with the addition of selectors, it could be used to pass CSS just to IE 7, such as:

* html>body>div {
width: 100px;
height: 200px;
}

... as a fall back in case IE 7 continues to have major CSS issues.

I'd just like to ask your views on this particular selector?

Again, thanks for the very informative and well received posting.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:00 AM by dh
Thanks for the update Chris. This is what we needed to hear. I can't wait for Beta 2 now.

# How about JScript?

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:07 AM by wafn
First thing: can we get some closure as to the support for :before and :after and the content property in CSS? I don't remember if it's CSS 2.0 or 2.1 or 2.01 or 2.3.75.4.6.7.6, but it's something absolutely required to make quality sites these days. Microsoft has always been the leader as far as dynamic content on websites, so don't skimp on this one.

Aside from that, I'd like to hear more information about JScript. I know it's not strictly in the IE team's court, but it is something tightly integrated with IE.
I have had problems recently with JScript, specifically in the area of functions. I don't know the terminology exactly, or even what is going wrong, but there is something really wrong with the 'var x = new Function() {...}' ...functionality. It just doesn't work.

Another thing about JScript: I seem to remember that in the past, if a JScript application was taking too long to do something, as if it was stuck in heavy recursion or an infinite loop, it would notify the user and ask if the script should stop running. This seems to still work for infinite loops, but not always for recursive functions. No idea how to fix that, but it's something that should be. With my test code, the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, and IE all crash/freeze, and I assume other ECMAScript-compatible browsers will also.


# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:09 AM by Miguel
Well this is certainly odd. One day everyone could cut your throats, and the next they're kissing your feet. And yes, I have to say, reading this post really made me cheer. Wouldn't have hurt to announce it earlier though. ;)

The only thing I really miss in that list is min/max-width/height. Is it too late in the game to add this to the list?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:14 AM by David Naylor
This is great news. Hopefully we can look forward to a swift 7.5 (or 8?) release with even further improved standards support.

http://naylog.blogspot.com/2005/07/many-rendering-bugs-fixed-for-ie7-beta.html

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:25 AM by Ben Cooke
Anyone who has relied on the various "hacks" to stop different browsers seeing different rules should expect to have to tweak them each time a new browser is released. That is why they are called "hacks".

If you don't want to worry about the maintenance of your hacks, you shouldn't implement them in the first place. Just deal with it looking a little different cross-browser.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:37 AM by Tino Zijdel
Someone mentioned specificity bugs in CSS; from my memory it has to do with wrong calculation of specificity on elements with pseudo-classes (like :hover).
Also the following is broken:
element.class1.class2 { }
this will get applied to elements that have only class2 set, the class1 rule is ignored. This is probably a leftover from the original CSS1 implementation where only one class could be defined on an element.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 6:37 AM by Jello
I guess it is good that IE team thinks about complying a bit to one man-made standards, but I still find it more than ridiculous that some w3c makes standards, and not standard sites. I find all who suffer, bleed, have fever because of poor CSS positioning, itioning implementation seem more whiners than web designers to me. Don't get me wrong, there are good people making good sites using all the w3c zealotish requirements, but there are a lot more of those who never ever use CSS, PNG, ABC, DEF and still complain about "standards in IE". My point: no point, w3c are crippled whiners.
Wagga. IE rendering engine is good. Shall be better. If not, oh well...

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:02 AM by Chris Parker
Congratulations guys!

Im ashamed to admit that the first page i visited after loading the beta was positioniseverything. I was happy to see most of the bugs exposed on this site were fixed.

Thanks for the transparent png support...

Thanks for the :hover selectors...

Keep up the good work guys. Looking forward to the full release, although it will be difficult to wean me off of Firefox by then.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:06 AM by Sam Riley
in reply to the person hoping for font sizes to resize using a fixed dimension (px). that i and many other people consider to be a bug. pixels are fixed dimensions and so shouldnt scale, if you want a font to resize you should be using a relative dimension such as em.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:10 AM by Ivan
what's about supporting selectors like input[type="submit"]? Yes there are more important bugs out there that are waiting to be corrected, but this could be a good (solved) issue.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:15 AM by Noah
Ah finally. This is the type of post we want to see on this blog and from Microsoft: direct answers. It's a bit unfortunate that it took so long and there's still a long way to go to make developers happy but this is a good step in the right direction.

I was disappointed to see no mention of making "dotted" borders actually appears as dots instead of dashes and any mention of contextual selectors. If these are soley a feature of 2.1 (can't remember off the top of my head), then it's a pretty lame reason not to implement them.

# CSS 2.1

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:21 AM by Robert Marshall
> in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it’s been Recommended)

CSS 2.1 *is* recommended. See http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1111107793&count=1

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:23 AM by Tino Zijdel
As for CSS2.0 vs 2.1 please read: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1111107793&count=1
CSS2.1 is CR; it is implied that vendors who implement CSS2 should follow the 2.1 specifications.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:25 AM by Sebastian Werner
All HTML related here, but what's about JavaScript.

Great could be better JavaScript performance. Especially I would like to see if you the memory leaks in your engine. And please make arrays and object creation and fill faster. In my Firefox this runs with doubled performance. And IE seems to get slower with the growth of the javascript array. Firefox does not have this problem.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:26 AM by Erik Arvidsson
It is great that you are now supporting :hover correctly. Are you also planning to support :active and :focus (and maybe even :disabled from CSS3)? Using the CSS3 pseudo classes allows most of the UI handling to be moved from js to css where it belongs.

It would also be nice if you fixed your get/set/hasAttribute bugs in DOM but I guess that might be a bit too complicated at the current stage.

# CSS i IE7 beta 2

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:30 AM by Webaksess
Chris Wilson beklager i IEblog at IE7 beta 1 viser s&#229; d&#229;rlig fremgang i sin CSS-st&#248;tte, men lover at dette vil bli mye bedre i IE7 beta 2.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 7:30 AM by David "W3bbo" R
This is all well and good, but there's 2 major things missing.

1. display: table-*;
2. Box-model tables

Currently IE6 renders tables "specially", rather than treating each <tr> and <td> as "display: table-row;" and "display: table-cell;" elements respectivly. (Hence why IE6 doesn't support those CSS display property values).

"display: table-cell;" is a particullary useful CSS property value, since it means that a box "fills" its parent (much better than "height: 100%;"), Firefox and Opera both support the table-cell, table-row, et al. property values flawlessly.

With "display: table-cell;" support, it allows CSS layouts to do everything tabular ones can, with "full height columns" being one of the reasons why CSS is having issues with getting converts.

Does anyone care to comment on this?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 8:26 AM by Alan Trick
w00t!

It's be a pain having to support another version of IE, but the fact that it is getting better standards support will make that soooo much easier. Thank you very much.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 8:47 AM by John Serris
This looks really promising guys! One thing that concerns me is :hover on all elements. I've mentioned this in a previous post about IE downloading css background-image's during each hover causing images to flicker. Can you make sure this is fixed? Check this link for details:
http://www.fivesevensix.com/studies/ie6flicker/

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 8:49 AM by Björn
About the guillotine bug.

You may have fixed the bug between releasing the beta and posting here in the IE blog, I wouldn't know. But if you meant that the guillotine bug is fixed in the current beta, you're wrong.

As Dave Shea points out in his blog here: http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/07/28/ie7_css_upda/ the beta doesn't fix it. See the screenshots:
IE6: http://www.mezzoblue.com/i/articles/28july2005-guillotine-ie6.png
IE7: http://www.mezzoblue.com/i/articles/28july2005-guillotine-ie7.png
Proper: http://www.mezzoblue.com/i/articles/28july2005-guillotine-proper.png


But then again, you've hopefully already fixed this. :)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 8:55 AM by Jesper
The only negative opinion I have about this post is that it was a long time coming. A perfect summary and a great answer to most of my questions as a web developer. Good work!

I hope for continuous follow-ups as you fix more bugs and address more issues, and I hope that the end result is that when IE7 ships and falls for "html > x" selectors instead of "* html x" ones, it will render the rest of the page (or at least a great deal) similar to the other browsers. And if it doesn't, I hope that conditional comments will work ;).

# Windows Vista Beta News

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:21 AM by Ramblings of a Code Monkey
The big news of the week is, of course, that Windows Vista Beta 1 has been released. In addition, IE7 Beta 1 was released as well. While I haven't installed either yet, this is definitely good news on the road...

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:24 AM by Lionel
@Chris Wilson: It looks _very_ good, and I thank you for the decision to post these details.

Am I right that one of the "large and difficult features" you mention is genrated content?

@Chris H, and all the people asking about the * html hack: Whatever happens for this particular hack, it's not a good idea to rely on browser bugs. Are you aware that there is a fully supported, backward- and forward-compatible way to special-case IE versions? Conditional comments are a much cleaner solution than CSS hacks. You could use e.g.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css">@import "ie-fix.css";</style>
<![endif]-->

and put all you hacks for previous versions of IE in ie-fix.css. Note that it doesn't affect validity, nor other browsers (no matter how exotic they are).

@Jim: XHTML support could be even harder to implement than many people realize.
As you note, the DOM itself poses some difficult problems: SVG and MathML have their own DOM specification, derived from the XML DOM. Combine this with the requirement of extensiblility, this means that it should be possible to subclass COM objects in the DOM tree. I'm not sure COM is flexible enough for this. Possibly something like javascript expandoes could be used, but it doesn't look very clean.
What is worse is the kind of implementation assumed by recent W3C works (esp. XHTML 2). They assume that they are free to make changes in the language, since XML-enabled browsers will be flexible enough to convert it on the fly. This means that the browser will have to convert the document object tree into an internal "visual" tree which can be rather different, _but_ both scripting and prgressive rendering will modify the document tree, which means that both trees must be kept in sync. Add the previous remark about subclassing, and your browser is turning into a nightmare. Sorting it out will require a lot of work.
(Note that this is very acute for IE, since it is built as COM objects, instead of simply providing interfaces for embedding).

@People complaining about the "integration into the OS": adding an HTML renderer library to the standard set of tools provided by the OS, and using HTML for parts of the interface in several programs, doesn't look like much of a security vulnerability. (Some, of course, since it's additional software). This is what the much-overrated "integration into the OS" amounts to. It's not a matter of special hooks into kernel mode, or whatever some people imagined.

@People who want fixes for memory leaks: As far as I understand, they _cannot_ be completely fixed in the current architecture (which combined a garbage-collected environement in javascript, and reference-counted objects in the underlying COM implementation. The real solution to this problem would be to move to a fully garbage-collected implementation (.Net), but this is necessarily a _very_ long term project, requiring a complete rewrite of the browser, plus resolving the backward-compatibility issue. I think such a projet would be a good idea, but don't hold your breath.

Keep up the good work!

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:25 AM by Dominic Self
Hooray! Thanks for delivering :D And as has been said above - keep it going!

# alpha transparency

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:36 AM by flaimo
it's great that you support alpha transparency PNG pictues, but you should not forget to think about a way how webdesigners can distinguish between IE7 and older versions. right now i'm using the "html > x" selector since every browser out there who supports alpha transparency PNG pictues also supports this selector. example:

body p {
background-image: image.gif;
}

body > p {
background-image: image.png;
}

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:37 AM by Luke
Will IE7 have a text zoom feature like Firefox's?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:41 AM by Jonny
Well.. this looks promising. :) Now I only have to update my pages like this:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
Get a decent browser. Your version of Internet Explorer can't handle this properly.
<![endif]-->

But this will only happen if max-width and min-width will be supported in IE7. Those two little thingies are my major wishes. Fingers crossed! Keep up the good work! :)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:42 AM by Mat Hall
Oddly enough, although I *loathe* the placement of the menus, toolbars, and address bar in IE7 when running XP, in Vista it actually seems to work -- the elements match better in some sort of vague and indefinable way...

# IE 7 Beta 2 Fix List

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:43 AM by Scott Watermasysk

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:45 AM by Joel
Wow... Next thing you'll be saying is that Apple are going to be using Intel chips...

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:47 AM by Rikki
I'd like to see a *good* Javascript console in IE7. Debugging JS on IE is a nightmare because of the poor debugger. It can't even get the line number correct.

Glad to see that IE developers, if not the project managers, take the standards seriously. Nice one guys :)

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:48 AM by Richard York
@flaimo
> right now i'm using the "html > x" selector
> how webdesigners can distinguish between IE7 and older versions

IE already has this functionality. It's called conditional comments.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 9:55 AM by Sorccu
How about adding the :last-child pseudo-class as well? I know, I know, it's CSS3, but the selectors-module is already a candidate recommendation and hey, how likely is it that the specs for :last-child will ever change? Not very. It shouldn't be that hard to add, either. I'll live even if you don't add it, but :first-child is quite lonely without :last-child ;)

It would mostly benefit list-based navigation systems, but could, of course, be used for anything.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:03 AM by Richard York
This is excellent news.

I'd like to see, at the very least everything in Dean Edwards' IE7 JavaScript in the real IE7.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:10 AM by Lachlan Hunt
Thank you for posting this, it's almost exactly the information I was hoping for.

> Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback

Can you explain what exactly you mean by that?

Also, are you aware of this bug that causes content to disappear when the browser window is resized? Any chance of getting it fixed, if you haven't already.
http://lachy.id.au/dev/css/bugs/ie/disappear/

Can you please also provide the following information:
1. a list of which CSS properties, from those which aren't currently supported in IE6, that will and will not be supported in IE7
2. A list of the individual properties that are currently buggy in IE6 that will/will not be fixed. (e.g. 'width' and 'height'?)
3. Details about the effect of known CSS hacks where the result differs from IE6.
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/

With this information, it should make it easier for authors to start writing their stylesheets with hacks that are less likely to cause disasters when IE7 is finally released. For example, if 'min-width' is supported, 'width' bugs are fixed, yet * html {} still works, then this common fix for IE6 will likely cause a problem in IE7:
#foo { min-width: 10em; width: auto; }
* html #foo { width: 10em; }

If, for example, that's the case, then we can start to prepare by changing the hack in some way, such as adding another "be nice to IE7" rule.
e.g.
*>html #foo { width: auto; }

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:18 AM by David Naylor
I could use some help from someone who has IE7 b1 installed. It's basically no effort - all I want is for you to load a certain webpage with a number of different stats services, so I can tell how good they are at ID:ing IE7. Send me a line if you could help me.

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:19 AM by David Naylor
Oops! Email: d dottt naylor at telia dott com

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:31 AM by LSW
Well this sounds great but I honestly have subconscious Twilight Zone music in my ears, this is a lage step for M$ that many of us never thought we would see.

If you pull this off then Kudos to you, I hope they pay you well, then you should get a raise.

I do have one problem with all this: A Eternal IE6. Maybe this has changed and I have missed it... but my last info is that IE7 was earmarked for Longhorn/Vista only. Only The Beta IE 7 would be available for XP and nothing for earlier OSs. That means people whith rather new XP PCs are not gonaa go Vista for a few years, so all the Win 98 (still alot out there) as well as ME, 2K and XP will still be using a Buggy IE6 for years to come. So all these slick improvements in IE 7 will make little difference for us Developers as long as large segments can not use it. We all know IE 5.5 has not yet trully died out, so imagine how long it will take IE6 to die if IE 7 only comes with a whole new OS?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:34 AM by fr
not sure if this is related to css but are you aware of this bug... http://www.noscope.com/journal/2004/02/horizontal_scrollbar_bug

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:39 AM by James Pickering
I am afraid I can become a devotee of MSIE until it rcognizes and processes of MIME type application/xhtml+xml.

James Pickering

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:39 AM by Martin
>> 1) If you click on a label of a
>> checkbox, radio
>> button or the like this should be
>> treated like
>> a click on the checkbox itself.

> In my universe, this works fine in IE6
> if you use an ID attribute on the form
> control and an identical value for the
> FOR attribute on the label.

Maybe he means <label><input ...> Text</label> ? This should work by HTML Standard, I don't know for IE.

But how about "BUG: The FOR Attribute of the LABEL Object Resets Focus" described at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314279
(The title gets the terminology wrong. IE resets the selection in the select element when the select element gets focus via label.)

Will that be fixed?

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:43 AM by Jonathan Snook
I'd like to request that a number of CSS properties in relation to tables be added or fixed as well:

* add CSS property border-spacing
* add CSS property empty-cells
* add CSS support for border when applied to COL or COLGROUP
* add CSS property caption-side

There are a few other discrepancies that I've remarked on here: http://www.snook.ca/archives/000167.html

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:53 AM by Joe D'Andrea
Chris, an appreciative "thank you thank you thank you" for taking the time to write this. Measurable goals! CSS 2! (I mean, hopefully, 2.1!) Someone pinch me. (Ow.)

I trust Acid2 will be tackled in time, and I appreciate that there's a lot more to this release than just CSS. What you've posted here matters all the same, it really does. Keep it up!

# What We Wanted: IE7 Beta 2

Saturday, July 30, 2005 10:57 AM by snook.ca - a collection of tips, tricks and bookmarks in web development
Looks like I was right, beta 2 is the browser we've all been waiting for. Microsoft has released a list of fixes that will appear in the second beta of Internet Explorer 7. I suspect the backlash after beta 1...

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

Saturday, July 30, 2005 11:09 AM by Silence
It must be said, I find this really really good news !

# re: Standards and CSS in IE

S