IE 7: Standards & CSS

Let's hope that the beta2 actually does address all the bugs mentioned. I read that beta1 has fixed alpha transparancies in png ONLY - no other fixes have yet to be seen.

No matter what they do - IE6 will have millions of users for a long time to come. For me its more disappointing that they don't appear to have any willingness to fix the bugs in IE6 - and I mean bugs not missing features (child selectors, :hover on all) or documented behaviours (hasLayout, height), things like 3px jog, double margins, guillotine, etc.

Everytime someone dances up and down about the wonderful new version of IE that will right all wrongs, I despair and have tried to point out that it will make not a sop of difference to anything unless MS were prepared to force all users of IE6 to upgrade, with the user base that IE6 has we will still need to taking it into account for a very long time, so what matter that they finally get their act together, whilst IE6 exists.

They should have and COULD have(according to people in the know )
fixed up IE6 to a fairly large degree, that they chose not to says a lot as indeed does the fact that, it still seems IE7 will be tied to Longhorn or Diva( or whatever stupid name they have decided to call it now).
But why fix up a piece of software out in the wild when you can write a new one lock it into a new operating system, you would be mad to miss the opportunity for the sales wouldn't you, and I'm sure that like XP you will probably have to upgrade half your hardware components to allow the OS to run at a crawl :roll:

Hugo.

For the record, I'm going straight to Linux. Sod MS, they suck

It's not about short-term software sales. It's about long-term sabotage of web development in order to keep the masses dependant upon their Windows-clad desktops ...or have I mentioned that before?

Yeah that as well Roy, the real game plan has always been quite obvious.

wouldn't it be great if MS would implement the "You Must Upgrade Now!!!" mentality of MSN Messenger?

Then at least we could get the patch they call IE 7 out faster to everyone and move on to the future disappointment of IE 8...

GAHHHHHH .. then all the sites with lovely IE hacks would probably break and I am guessing that most clients won't understand it's M$ fault, much easier to blame the developer. At least with slow implementation we will have time to adjust things accordingly.

I suspect that some of the developers of IE 7 truly intend to do what they are promising BUT in the end .. will it really happen? My guess is perhaps half of them will make it in the final shipped product and of those only half will work properly. Just speculation but if M$ past is any indication of what the future will be .. it's very possible.

I don't think this will even change now (solve this, something else will pop up), most people are just users and only care that they can do their work or fun and don't understand (or want to for that matter) all of this, including our clients.

Like Roy said, M$ WANTS to be a monopoly, Billy-Boy wants to rule the world and he could give a rats "you know what" what we (developers and users) want. I see some more pies flying around his future *grin*

Then at least we could get the patch they call IE 7 out faster to everyone and move on to the future disappointment of IE 8...

I whole-heartedly agree. If Microsoft are so adamant about updating their operating system more than once a day, then why aren't they looking at new bugs and holes in Internet Explorer and including those updates into the automatic update feature of XP?

Open-Source software such as Mozilla are excellent because they are constantly upgrading and tell you right away. The only people that ever seem to know about new Internet Explorer upgrades are people in the industry, the regular users never really know about it unless they stumble upon it randomly. Whether they've done something about that i don't know, but it looks like we'll have to cater for an extra IE version. How many does that make now?

I also bet the average user clicks on the 'automatic updates' for Windows assuming it's giving them security patches they need... if this also corrected IE problems incrementally that would be a good thing I figure...

I was having problems on my site re: flickering and flash ads on FF only. Just found out the other day they fixed the problem and have released as an overnight build, so if will surely be in the next version release. That is very handy!

AFAIK, the next FF build is either gonna be 1.5 or 2. Look forward to Firefox2

And this makes what, ie5, 5.5, 6 and now 7? I wouldn't be surprised if 7.5 is out soon.

There's a lot of stuff in that article that makes me laugh. Bless MS, they are trying, they're just 10 years too late

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.

the HTML4.01 abbr attribute? It's about time!

And CSS 2 or 2.1? Hasn't Fx supported that since the beginning? And isn't CSS3 on the horizon?

Well done IE, you think that adding in stuff you shoudl have added in 10 years ago is a big step forward, and everyone is going to love you for it.

you forgot IE 7.1, 7.15, 7.2 and 7.3

Not forgetting IE7.5 Mac

On a related note, there is a standard for docs called OpenDoc which is used by OpenOffice and others and was made the standard for the state of Massachusetts. MS has criticized Mass for doing this and, at the same time, is a member of the OpenDoc standards group. (read at microsoft-watch web site)

AFAIK, the openoffice format was XML, which Microsoft plan on using . . then patenting . . . grrrrrr