Please test your sites with IE7
I’m very excited we’ve released a public preview of beta2 that everyone can download. I’m also very happy that we’ve opened up a couple of different avenues to take your feedback. As Dean mentioned, there is a great checklist for site developers on the IE7 preview site; I wanted to call out a specific item on that list.
Markus posted a while ago about the demise of CSS hacks in IE. We heard your feedback in the comments to that post, and we’ve put out a public preview release of IE7. I’d like to reiterate the call to action – if you are a web developer, please check your usage of CSS hacks. In addition to all the improvements in our CSS standard support that I talked about in July, and the other stuff I mentioned at the PDC, the IE layout team – developers, testers and program management – has done some amazing work since my last update and fixed the core of our CSS box model overflow problem (this means content overflow does not need to cause boxes to grow in size). We’re still refining our solution, but this means, for example, that simultaneously 1) the Holly hack won’t work properly anymore, and 2) it probably won’t be applied, because as we said before, the Star-HTML hack is gone.
It’s a difficult challenge to keep compatibility with sites and apps but break compatibility for standards compliance, and we would appreciate you checking your sites and making necessary changes where you’ve hacked in non-standard stuff for IE in the past. We would particularly like detailed feedback on the work we’re doing in this area.
We’re all very excited to start releasing. We’re going to try to restrain ourselves from posting dozens of blog posts today, and stop at three. :-)
- Chris Wilson
Update: We now have a MSDN article that walks you through CSS compatibility issues: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/IETechCol/cols/dnexpie/ie7_css_compat.asp