Matthias Klaey <mp**@hotmail.comwrote in
news:tn********************************@4ax.com:
"David W. Fenton" <XX*******@dfenton.com.invalidwrote:
>>Smartin <sm********@yahoo.comwrote in
news:Uu******************************@giganews.c om:
>>Lyle Fairfield wrote:
Just a word of warning:
[...]
>>they basically left CSS compliance hardly altered. This means that
IE remains a substandard web browser for modern CSS-driven layout.
And it means that designing websites will require the same old
workarounds for IE's nonstandard CSS implementation.
could you please substantiate this claim? I am very interested in
CSS compliance.
I was basing this on a Slashdot post from this last August:
http://developers.slashdot.org/artic.../08/07/1824250
I just Googled on the subject and it turns out that Slashdot post
stirred up something of a dustup, as it was citing an article that
was a year old at the time it was posted on Slashdot:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/windowsp.../ArticleID/472
08/windowspaulthurrott_47208.html
A member of the IE 7 team responded here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive...10/694584.aspx
There is something of a tacet admission that CSS support came late
in the process. The August 2005 article was evaluating Beta 1, and
it had major CSS support issues. If you're still completely
revamping your rendering engine in what should be one of its core
functions in Beta 1, then it's clear either that the Beta was
released too early, or that the actual changed to the rendering
engine's handling of CSS are mostly superficial.
Clearly, things are better than I thought they were because I was
basing my judgment on a year-old article (I certianly didn't notice
the date). But I'm not sure that the apologia for the development
priorities in this article is credible:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=260
There it is claimed that standards compliance was their main focus
for IE7, but that doesn't seem credible if they still had major
things to fix by the time of the release of their first beta. One
key point made there is that IE7 is sacrificing more backwards
compatibility than is typical for MS products. This is probably
because IE5 * 6 were so horridly bad in terms of standards
compliance. The result is that a lot of sites that have been coded
specifically for the quirks of IE5 & 6 will now break, and show that
those of us who have been calling for coding to the standards and
then hacking to fix IE bugs were right all along. If IE 7 is so much
more standards compliant than 5 & 6, then those who've coded their
web pages to standards will need to do nothing more than edit their
browser sniffer to deliver W3C-compliant HTML/CSS to IE7 and Mozilla
and Safari and Opera, and deliver the old kludged hacks just to old
versions of IE. Those who've based their main HTML/CSS codebase on
IE's nonstandard rendering engine will have major problems, unless
they are already delivering different code to standards-compliant
browsers.
For a long time MS's own websites rendered in a substandard way for
all browsers except IE, but in the last two or three years, this has
changed so that you get the same results with any major browser.
Those who've not adapted their websites like MS did are in for
problems.
And it adds yet another rendering engine with quirks to worry about.
I hope that the quirks are relatively minor, the kind one codes for
to handle Safari or Opera users. But I fear it will be yet another
IE rendering engine that has major classes of CSS functionality that
are not handled correctly.
We'll have to wait and see how it shakes out, I guess.
I won't be able to test IE7 because there's no version available for
the best desktop version of Windows, 2000, which is what I use
exclusively.
--
David W. Fenton
http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com
http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/ 
