
Bruce: Seriously… I was reacting angrily, but the post was both on topic, relevant and not a personal attack. Aside from the word "damn" not a single obscene word was used.
Chris, the target of the "personal attack" seems to agree:
At any rate, you don’t want it posted here, fine. I do wish I had copied it, I would have posted it on my own site.
As someone developing mostly web applications, not websites, I’d like to see:
* overflow on tbody elements, print thead on every page
* :hover on all tags
* transparent PNG support
* peekaboo/float bug fixes
* full <button> tag support
* javascript constructor to new XMLHttpRequest object
Asking my question again since I think it is tremendously important and I got no answer : what about Tasman on Windows ?
</Daniel>
I would not personally have bothered removing your post, but it did violate the posting policy Bruce referred to.
Jon,
You said:
> Note that they would be having this debate *before* ever trying to give any thought to implementation.
The fact of the matter is that they already got past the debate and implemented something. You seemed to be characterising them as uninterested in implementation. This is wrong.
I agree that there is a tradeoff between debate and implementation, but IMHO the web has suffered from too many developers implementing the first thing that came into their heads without thinking it through. The timeframe you are talking about is particularly plagued with things like this.
Examples:
The web has a lot of cruft in it in the name of "pragmatism" that is actually "went ahead and implemented something before asking for outside opinions, and then decided it’s easier to ignore the problems than reimplement it".
I wouldn’t characterise that attitude as "As much as possible they worked with the standards groups."
As far as things go today, the W3C requires implementations before something becomes a recommendation now. That’s a step in the right direction, but your argument seems to be built on the very shaky premise that you can either go off and implement something on your own, or be stuck in an ivory tower, with no happy medium where implementing and specifying can happen at a complementary pace. That’s the attitude that got us in this mess to begin with.
What i would appreciate is the Restriction of silent Installation of BHOs which are root of Trojans spread by IE..there should be some alert box before every BHO gets installed..i think IE developers should seriously resolve this issue rather adding new features and inviting new trojans
-adnan
They deleted my post…
Ok.. let me ellaborate.
The secret: MSFT is paying W3C to delay both XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3.0 Recommendations so that they can implement them in IE7 when they are done tweaking with ‘security’ issues, they will launch, yet again, the best browser on the planet; thus, regain their 100% market share.
I am persistent, Bill. You know that I know that my designer buddies know that I want to keep designing with IE, but right now, what looks good in IE doesn’t look so good in FF.
In essence, why even bother asking the public about what they want when you already know what you want?
—————————
Jon, I’m sorry but I gotta say this: dude, chill. This is turning more into a war between you and your pal. Shake hands and admit that we all lose when it comes to Microsoft. "We’re not worthy."
—————————–
Mr. Wilson, the solution is simple. Listen to your customers. We pay. You, on the other hand, get paid.
——————————-
If I had 43 billion dollars for every time Microsoft buys their way to the top, my car would be in Bill Gates’ garage. That’s IF I didn’t have to work overtime(for free) to fix bugs that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
———————————-
It’s like they love to get us all worked up, just so they can take away our pride.
At least the Mozilla team listens… for free.
At least the secret is out. Again.
Chris Wilson: "Would you really prioritize getting this blog to validate as a work item for the IE team over working on actual IE issues like CSS support?"
That "either/or" scenario perfectly highlights the disconnect between the MS IE dev team and the community. Standards are important. Period. Exclamation Point!
Get it? Then show it. You need actions, not words at this point.
I am a simple web developer working for a small university division as a student worker. I’m currently implementing a new template for our website. The site looks fine in Firefox, but not in IE. Making it work in IE is taking a lot of extra time, and that means my company is spending more money for no extra functionality. Your mention of standards support has revealed a light at the end of the tunnel. I would like for this train to go forwards and not backwards.
> That’s the attitude that got us in this mess to begin with.
And there is our fundamental disagreement. Unlike most of the people on this blog, I don’t consider the Web a mess. I consider it an amazing success. I think the majority of the world would agree with me.
I will certainly agree that there is a lot of ugliness that needs to be improved. But I would assert that the biggest problem is that the rate of change has drastically slowed down. I would rather have 100 new features every 6 months even if 5 of them aren’t 100% thought out. Code darwinism.
I realize that opinion will set me against everyone on this blog (due to who is reading this blog)…hmmm. maybe that does make me a troll.
I won’t try to defend frames since I didn’t think they were a good idea at the time either. However, never attribute to malice what is easier attributed to stupidity. Also, you make it sound like Netscape had months or years to flush out every idea. There was a lot of time in the real early days that Netscape was weeks/days from running out of cash. If we had waited months/years for "standards", the company wouldn’t have existed and I don’t believe the web would exist in anything resembling it’s current shape (which rememeber I think is 99.9% good).
What was the biggest thing we got slammed for in the early days? Adding inline images via the IMG tag. What HTML addition caused the biggest (percentage) growth in usage? You know it. Text-only systems like Gopher had been around for *years*. Hypertext systems existed all over the place…
Enough of this. I just started posting because I thought it funny that Chris Wilson was getting slammed by the standards when he is 95% on your side. Just think if I was making the decisions?
-Jon
IE way of doing things IS the standard. However the USABILITY needs big improvements if you want to keep IE way of doing things The standard. If I find other browser have better User Experience, it does not take long to make the switch!
That should be your priority #1!
DaveP, I mailed your comment to you – I get every comment in my email, I still had it.
Feel free to post on your site and trackback here.
> Unlike most of the people on this blog, I don’t consider the Web a mess. I consider it an amazing success.
I think it’s both. Socially, it’s a success. Technically, it’s a mess. The two aren’t mutually exclusive (and, conversely, they don’t depend upon each other).
> But I would assert that the biggest problem is that the rate of change has drastically slowed down.
I agree here.
> I would rather have 100 new features every 6 months even if 5 of them aren’t 100% thought out. Code darwinism.
The trouble is that the bad solutions just don’t die. It only take as handful of popular sites to use something that’s badly designed, and user-agents have to support it for a decade or more.
Again, I’d like to stress the point that it’s not all or nothing. Not everything needs to be 100% thought out or standardised, but it would make a big difference if there was at least a little consideration of outside opinions and consensus before implementation. That doesn’t require waiting around for months or overengineering.
Take nofollow as an example. The biggest problems anybody had with nofollow is that it was named stupidly, and underspecified (does the bot actually not follow, or does it just not award page rank?). One week on the W3C mailing list and that would have been ironed out. But since implementations were just dropped on us without warning or input, there was no chance to correct this, and now it will be "nofollow that might follow" for eternity.
Granted, it’s not a big problem, just a small example of how a little discussion could solve obvious problems and make things simpler.
Appreciate that Bruce, Thank you.
"web developers are our customers"
Can you get any more wrong than that?
Your customers are people who use the browser to browse sites!
If you do all the thing web developers want, that just means more ways of pushing malicious or annoying code through the browser!
If your CUSTOMERS (not developers) find that other browsers give better experience when browsing *sites they will make the switch.
* Site is a web site filled with annoying flashy moving advertisements, active and java script etc.
Remember, there is acknowledged choices now. Web sites may work in IE full of nasty code, but all that goes to waste if everyone have moved to the other browser which does not run the nasty code.
Tom:
my point is that (despite common misperception) my team has a finite amount of bandwidth. I was not saying this blog validating is unimportant, simply that I would expect it would help the webdev community much more for my team to focus on improving IE’s standards support than to go focus on getting whatever blog software we’re using to generate valid HTML in all cases (particularly when, to my knowledge, said validation errors do not cause any problems in any UA I know of). Again – I’m not saying invalid content is fine and dandy, just lower priority than improving IE, my real job.
IEBlog のエントリー IE and Standardsで、Chris Wilson氏がIE 7のWeb標準サポート強化を表明した。 Wilson氏は 1995年のIE 2.0のリリース直前にIE開発チームに参加し、2001年にIE 6.0をリリースした後はAvalonプロジェクトに関わっていたが、4ヶ月前にチームに戻ってきたとのこと。またIE開発チームに所属していた際、IEやHTML、DOM、XSL、i18nに関するW3CのワーキンググループにMicrosoft社の代表として参加してきたそうだ。Microsoft社のなかでも Web標準に最も関わりの深い人物のひとりと言ってよいだろう。 以下、上記エントリーからの抜粋。 Additionally, with every subsequent major release of IE, we have expanded and improved our implementation of web standards, particularly CSS and HTML. When we shipped IE 6.0,…
If you start with the presupposition that you can pick and choose when to adhere to standards, then you are just setting yourself up for failure.
Sloppy habits breeds sloppy code.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak
By Mary Jo Foley.
Microsoft has shared publicly that IE 7.0 will be focused primarily on improving security. Company officials said recently that Microsoft plans to make IE 7.0 available to Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Professional x64 users. A first beta of IE 7.0 is due out this summer.
But Microsoft is sharing quite a bit more IE 7.0 specifics privately with key partners, sources who requested anonymity claim.
Sources say that IE 7.0 – which is code-named "Rincon," they hear – will be a tabbed browser..
 7.0 and Microsoft’s Windows anti-spyware service, which currently is in beta..
Apart from fundamental fixes/additions already mentioned (position:fixed, full PNG support, :hover pseudo-class on all elements, DOM event model), please, if you plan to add support to child selectors or fix bugs used to made CSS hacks for IE6, then please fix all the major bugs present in IE6 and add REAL full support for CSS 1 & 2, son we can simply write standard code for IE 7 and other compliant browsers and still be able to continue hacking for IE 6 (wich is going to be in the arena for some years after IE7 release). If finally you focus on security and only add minor improvements, better left that bugs untouched so we can hack for IE7 in the same way as for IE6 (I’ll really dislike that, but the alternative is even worse).
What I’d like to see implemented in future versions of IE, is better (would "full" be utopian) support for CSS2, as well as future versions of the CSS standard.
In particular, :hover for all elements and position: fixed would save some time and headaches.
Also, PNG alpha transparency support would be a good thing.
Thanks for this blog and the opportunity to give our wishlist. I just hope that you’ll not only read the posts but also will implement what most web developers request.
Regards,
Michaël
Almost everybody including me is begging for proper png suppport.. Even if we have it in IE7 people won’t be able to use it because of all the IE6’s out there.. So Chris, please hear my words:
Please do a IE6 patch that people will download from windows update, to force IE use the direct X filter for ALL pngs.. It is the EASIEST solution of all, just make it use the directX filter whenever it sees a PNG. Couple this update with a mandatory security update so everybody should download it!!! We’ll have proper PNG support in IE6’s within montsh if you do this, so I hope you take my words into account…
Its simple guys. If IE refuses to follow the standards as stated by W3C, don’t develop your sites for IE. Put a requirement on your site saying that your site requires Firefox. All the items needed are at
Either Microsoft will fix IE, or it will die a painful death. It’s that simple.
Bruce, do you trust Mary Jo Foley as a reliable source?
Also, are you going to make blog post that will confirm/deny her article?
Dr. X
You obviously don’t have any real clients, do you?
MSN Testing Personalized ‘Start’ Page
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
March 15, 2005, 1:25 PM
Microsoft’s MSN unit is testing what it calls an "incubation experiment" of a new "start" page for Web browsers. The site, located at Start.com, serves as an aggregator for RSS feeds and allows users to custom tailor its content.
The project comes as MSN properties struggle to change a lackluster brand image brought on by fast-moving rivals such as Google. MSN employees recently called on users to give their opinions on what the company can do to improve its perception among early adopters and the media.
In fact, the new Start.com takes a number of pages from Google’s playbook. Along with being simple and advertising free, the site draws on RSS technology that is popular among seasoned Web users. It also utilizes advanced HTML for customization and stores preferences as a unique URL, much like Google News.
"This isn’t a final product but instead is intended to show people some of the ideas we at MSN are exploring around providing a rich experience around Web-based RSS/Atom aggregation," said MSN Program Manager Dare Obasanjo.
MSN Portal Team member Venkat Narayanan stressed that his team is simply "playing around with a number of different ideas" and pointed out two versions of Start.com currently in consideration.
"We definitely would love to get feedback from folks about the site. I’m personally interested in where people would like to see this sort of functionality integrated into the existing MSN family of sites and products, if at all," said Obasanjo. (Firefox version) (IE version)
These are official Microsoft pages… MICROSOFT WANTS TO CATER TO FIREFOX USERS? PURE GENIUS! Kudos to the MSN team.
Support the…W3C DOM standard event model, the CSS :hover pseudo-classes on all elements and position:fixed in CSS. I’m also dying for all the float bugs to be fixed. FULL and CORRECT CSS2!!
PLEASE!! – I’m starting to get a lot of clients that explicitly want there sites to be optimized in FireFox.
I’m glad you finally see web developers as your CUSTOMERS. You have really let us down since IE6’s release. I’ve watched web devs BEG for updates and standards support over the past 5 years or so. I’ve spent countless hours and sleepless nights dealing with CSS bugs. Do you realise how frustrating and humiliating this must be for us? How long have we BEGGED for native PNG Alpha support? No one likes to beg and no one likes to be IGNORED. MS, where were you when we needed you?
Developers, developers, developers… Why has it taken so long for web developers’ requests to be acknowledged? If it wasn’t for Firefox and you losing some market share, I’m POSITIVE our requests would still be ignored!
You know what though? I’m willing to give you a second chance. I’m willing to forget the pain and humiliation. Firefox is here to "Take back the web". Your task is to "Take back the web developers". Don’t screw it up. This is my last plea. I refuse to beg any longer. You’ve heard it all before:
* fix css 1 ( see )
* full css 2.1 ( min/max width/height, position fixed, :hover, :before, :after, display: table etc etc etc)
* fix wacky css bugs (floats, 3 pixel jog etc )
* full png spec ( we need full native alpha support )
* fix javascript memory leaks when using closures ( see )
Thanks for listening.
"I want to believe"
As other said, no need to build a complete list of what you must implement. Everything can be said in one sentence :
Support W3C Standards
Please don’t add features. Fix the broken stuff. Support the min/max-width/height properties. Make it so nesting "position: relative" elements inside each other doesn’t fall apart after the third nesting. Fix the * selector behavior. Support every kind of CSS selector you can find a spec for.
PLEASE make the following Standards improvements:
1 – FULL native support for CSS 1, 2)
For example, in a Mozilla-based browser I can view full CSS and MathML and XML:
…but I get an error message in IE – a case where an "underlying" technological deficiency simply prevents me from viewing scientific material – if that’s not a Standards problem, I don’t know what is!
Now, try making sense of this:
… in IE…and then compare it with recent Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, and Opera browsers…if I’m a mathmatician wanting to publish my research online and I come up with the onscreen crap that IE gives me, there’s a problem and *as a mathmatician* I’m not going to give a damn about "standards" – I’m going to say (and rightly so) that IE sucks…
6 – Tabbed Browsing
7 – NO integration with the OS (yes, I think that’s a Standards issue)
8 – NO integration with other Office products (again, I think that’s a Standards issue)
9 – SMALL Core Footprint, with the ability for plug-in/extension development to provide for more specific features – also the ability to *completely* uninstall IE, like every other browser on earth! (doesn’t MS have confidence enough in its own browser, that it can actually, truly allow its customers to *choose* it–not simply by "choosing" an OS?–which, of course, is no choice at all for most people on the planet)
10 – FIX IE’s printing bug, where it prints something like "`1TempNNL02KNO.htm" instead of simply printing a web page’s actual URL — a properly printed URL seems a pretty good "standard" to me
11 – related printing capability: as in Firefox, let the user choose from a selection of options of "document info" (date, page #, URL, etc.) and let the user assign any of these choices to any of the 4 corners of the page
12 – in the true spirit of Bill Gates’ stated desire for interoperability, how about an IE7 for Linux, Unix, OS/2, AIX, Solaris, Mac, etc. like so many other software makers’ products?–or even for MS’ other operating systems?–I think Bill is right that such interoperability should be "standard", and it should be standard *at least* for all MS OSs
If IE can’t be relied upon to do the basic UI work of properly rendering W3C standards, then the "extras", even extra security, will never make up for its deficiencies.
Please make IE 7 and IE 6 run side by side, so you don’t make people waste money on additional machines for testing.
Or, provide a developer mode of some sort to switch to IE 6 rendering engine.
It is very likely that when IE 7 comes out, IE 6 will still be most popular, for a VERY long time.
No matter what you do (and I ditto all those standards advocates!) please also make IE 7 run with IE 6 on the same machine somehow…
Here’s what I want:
When I open IE7, I want pages to look as close as possible to how they do in Firefox, Opera, and Safari without having to do IE hacks etc. Every browser has its bugs, but those get along very well and IE should aim for the same standards compliance.
>Chris Wilson
Weren’t you the guy lamely defending IE6 on Alistapart.com years ago when it came out? Yet very little support was added from ie5.5, and the fact that massive MS couldn’t then and still can’t do as much as little old Opera for css shows what you guys think about standards. You don’t want too many standards as that lessens MS’s market advantages.
And surely you knew then what was needed then when bringing out 6, as much as you already know now. So why ask yet again? Damn, just surf over to Dean’s IE7 site if you still can’t figure it out after all these years.
These are pathetic delaying/marketing tactics, that’s all, to make it look like you care when it’s clear you – sorry, MS – don’t want standards across the board. Same with MS’s own "ie7" announcement with no standards support in it.
When you support everything in Dean’s IE7, then we can say you actually care. Until then…
I would suggest you tell your bosses that QA is essential, and that you WILL NOT ship with all the obvious, known to Microsoft, problems, first. Tell them that working 80 hours a week to get it out at their chosen time doesn’t work. Exhausted employees cannot see the problems or think clearly enough to correct them.
Either way, Full compliance means FULL COMPLIANCE, not "good enough for Bill, so ship it".
I don’t quite understand why it’d be *that* hard to use the quirk/strict modes.
Switching from quirk to strict is clearly not something the basic frontpage-using web page creator is able to do.
One using strict mode usually means it, really, in the "I want what I use to be strictly implemented and not in a half assed way", he’ll use the W3C HTML/XHTML, CSS, DOM and DOM event model (or try to)
Now what i’d want to see under strict mode:
The regular CSS 1, 2.1 and optionnal 3 request, as well as HTML4.01 and XHTML1 and 1.1 (including the XHTML MIME types), W3C DOM and DOM event model, XForms, SVG, Ruby, MathML and full PNG (Alpha Channel AND gamma correction).
But what i’d also like to see are:
No more switching back to quirk when using the XML prolog (you know, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>), strict mode lock-in (and strict XML parsing) when parsing application/xml, text/xml and application/xhtml+xml type files, as well as a CSS switcher.
BTW, a method to fully disable MSIE hacks if they’re not needed anymore (read: MSIE becomes fully standard compliant in strict mode)
1- Comply to standards, CSS and DOM (no more * html {})
2- Disable conditional comments in strict mode (keep’em in quirks), one doesn’t need special features when one complies to the standards (not even sure you need to, since most people use [if lt IE7])
3- You’re done, you haven’t broken anything and you’ve made web devs happy (and MSIE users able to get everything they can from CSSZenGarden, even "special effects" designs).
As a final note, I do believe the web developpers would be more than happy to help you beta-test IE7’s compliance to HTML, CSS or DOM when the time’ll come.
The aforementioned deleted comment, and a follow up, are living over at my site:
Please add full PNG support in future versions.
All your base are belong to us.
keep up the good work Chris.
if IE is good for you, use it.
if not FF.
great to have different selections of browsers.
one has this flaw, one has that flaw..
for me, i like the orange better than the apple.
probably someone likes the apple more, so i give my apple to that person.=D
Gabriel Mihalache said:
>>>or use Gecko for renderding
Hold the phone. That’s not a bad idea. Everyone, just take a breath, relax for a moment, and then tell me one reason not to build IE7 on top of gecko.
The IE wiki has has a very well-written list of specifics, with "WHY" rationales for most of the requests. It appears to be more comprehensive than even the sum total of all comments on this thread.
add support in IE7 for plugins that the community can create..but also make make it so that those plugins can’t just automatically be installed….make it so that the user has to type in a code or something
also..add a feature to IE7 where people can push a button and lock the browser so that nothing can be downloaded from the net. except maybe picture formats..and this option should be on by default..but make it esaily accessable for average computer users.
Instead of using a folder/cache where stuff is downloaded to..make it so that all stuff from the net that is downloaded go to a single file that windows cannot access…so that anything u might get from the net can’t infect windows…only the browser.
one more request….make IE7 have a option on by default that will totally clean out the cache file every day or 2
My wife called me today, saying she has written this really long email when she accidentally hit "Esc". The whole long text was gone and the right-click Undo was grayed out. I had no option but saying that I’ll introduce her to FireFox when I get home.
So in IE7, don’t make Esc clearing the field and double Esc behaving like a reset button. If you don’t trust me, trust Jacob Nielsen, who says that all Reset buttons should be banned and this would make the Internet a much better place.
Also it’s a good idea to not disable the Undo option. Oh, and the standards, right, don’t forget the standards
Chris, You say "Microsoft does respond to customer demand; web developers are our customers." and so far, everyone has asked for a standards compliant browser and transparient PNG support, and better security, so instead of partially supporting the W3C standards, Listen to your customers and web developers, we have spoken. Anything less is not acceptable.
."
@John Serris:
Whats so amazing about having a web browser which (as you claim) ~85% of the market use, when the use of it was practically ramrodded down their throats?
I’m actually amazed that Internet Explorer has stood up against the ravages of time, and given just how many frustrated and perplexed users and developers are out there, it’s a miracle that IE is even still around – but wait, the only reason it is still around is because of the enormous mass that Microsoft has in its wallet.
This is really Microsoft’s SEVENTH chance, if they fubar this one, then it really is only one ‘persons’ fault (collectively).
If you – and the other hundreds, if not thousands of possible viewers/commenters on this site – do so truly want to believe, then make Microsoft earn you trust and faith, and start developing only for those browsers which advocate a high W3C specification compliancy, even if it means forcing users to download Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Whatever.
Then we will our permanent revolution.
I’m a gainfully employed web developer that charges by the hour. Personally, I love the bugs as I can charge three times the price for the same site. The bugs also act as a nice barrier to entry in the already crowded industry. On the other side, fixing them will mean a bunch of sites will fail and the amateur developers will be exposed. That would boost my business by multiples I’m sure.
So really – do what ever you want – I win either way. All I would ask is disclosure and explanation of the differences.
I could care less about PNG transparency support as well. Frankly, supporting it will just bring a whole new breed of dreadful interfaces and harsh user experiences that will have little chance of porting over to other platforms. Just look at the horrors created in full Flash sites. As an ardent supporter of accessibility, I would only occasionally benefit in minor ways from the feature.
What I would truly benefit from is:
• Better security.
• Opera’s zoom feature. Get be rid of browser text sizes altogether: they are ineffective and just make for ugly sites. Far better that the visually impaired get a bigger version of everything – not just the odd heading tag that the newbie forgot to stipulate in pixel size. This would reduce the need for liquid layouts too.
• And a more personal one: the exceptional “web developer” tool bar extension as seen in Fire Fox.
One simple request. Not sure if it has just been overlooked or it is a bug that has never been fixed bc your documentation states that you support it…
Please implement support for scrolling tables. It would be nice if I could present a data table and have the <th> elements fixed while the <tbody> scrolls.
@Chris : "particularly when, to my knowledge, said validation errors do not cause any problems in any UA I know of"
This is because browsers are too permissive, when dealing with text/html. Now, create a XHTML page, introduce some little errors inside, send it with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, and open it with FireFox… You’ll see a error message, showing a validation problem
With the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, user agents should use a XML parser, so validating your page *is* important.
Jim, for the record, I agree with basically everything in your last post.
Whenever it is possible, I think the more input received from smart people, the better. In most cases, these days, that is practical to do in parallel with specification and development.
I’m sure that Chris agrees since that was the point of all of this in the first place.
-Jon
In addition to some of the features mentioned above, it would be great if IE7 would support international characters in domain names, such as æ, ø, å, ü, etc.
Also, a cool thing would be if it supported the "data" URL scheme:
How about accepting the Acid 2 challenge?
what about margin-bottom: -..px This in combination with a <ol><li> item </li><li> item2 </li></ol> creates some "IE" fun on the website..
Good luck!
To be honest, when I was developing web pages that should work on both IE and Firefox, most time were spent on Firefox to find out workaround. IE does add a lot of extension to standard (especially DHTML model), one example is you can use customized property in HTML elements which saves me a lot of time. Talking about standards, I believe most Java programmers had been using XML have heard of xml4j, because the standard API of XML is evil to use, a single method of selectSingleNode in dom4j can take more than 10 lines using standard XML API defined by W3C. Not IE should listen to developer, the standard makers should listen to programmers too!
Just rehashing what everyone else has said – comply with the standards. Completely. Nothing else is important.
I contract to the largest telecommunications company in australia who have recently decided to phase support of ie5 out by the end of 2005 and to phase ie6 out by the end of 2006 in favour of Firefox. Not because of any great benefits to the users but because of the massive benefits to the web devs – we don’t want to develop for ie in its current state and either that needs to change or ie will die.
Oh, and something that frustrates me no end is ie’s inability to correctly garbage collect circular references involving COM objects (DOM or ActiveX). Please fix that – it can’t be that hard as many other browsers don’t have this problem.
Alpha-PNGs. Without filters.
Go here and learn about ACID2:
Then do it. Then your browser share will maybe stop eroding.
Chris,
You ask us what we want? OK!!…
Here it goes……….EVERYTHING!!
Chris: Thanks for your article. I’ve put together a list at <a href=""></a>, along with a few gripes about how your commenters are handling this situation. I wanted to thank you for allowing us to contribute to your project. Best of luck to you and your team.
Will there be transparent PNGs… A SIMPLE YES OR NO WILL SUFFICE!
"To be honest, when I was developing web pages that should work on both IE and Firefox, most time were spent on Firefox to find out workaround."
I think you’ll find that you are in the minority on this. Chances are better that you were so used to coding wrongly for IE that you assumed that Firefox was incorrectly displaying something that IE did "correctly" when the reality is that IE’s "correct" display was not correct.
FWIW, Bruce’s [MSDN] comment above, at is the real deal.
If they tell us ANYTHING, they will be out of work. That’s the MS, or is it the BGMS way.
And to add to the perpetual list, PULLEEZE get this browser to render to the W3 Specs. Forget Bill and company. I’ve already stopped testing in IE. If it’s broke it IE, Oh well..
The "I’m MS. I’m bigger than the world. Therefore I" is beginning to loose to other vendors whose products are more compliant and they understand the CLIENT is the developer. The CUSTOMER is because of the Developer. MS is a business because of those customers. Like any other business, without those customers, MS will not have a business.
Here are some additional things I would like to see; Most are not msdn material.
- capability to turn of tab browsing
- a simple one click feature that deletes all cookies, cached files, offline content, history, search history from google msn yahoo etc toolbars, auto complete, passwords, downloaded certificates, etceteras.
-logoff or ability to erase all stored passwords from RAM, so IE7 asks you to login in again if you refresh page. Sites should not have to ask you to close browser for security.
- icon cache – Support for better safari like favicon.ico support, no need to bookmark to show and use icons in URI bar
- a multi-setting control in toolbar that based on one of many settings: opens all subsequent clicks in a) new window, b) in new tab, c) same window, d) new window but minimized, d) new maximized window
- color coded and formatted view source
- search edit area with selectable provider: google, msn, ask jeeves
- better support for <OPTGROUP> consider heirarchical menu instead? better css support for <OPTGROUP>
- ability to drag buttons in the menu toolbar
- display "phis.br" prominently on statusbar in bold to avoid security issues with urls like:
- fix alignment bugs
- extend url length from 2083 characters
- do not implement tip of the day status bar
- Save as mhtml from a dropdown toolbar? The save icon should support a dropdown (similar to back button’s dropdown) and show save as options directly
- html4.01, css2.1, etc for sure, but maintain backward compatibility
Please, fix the box model. But get it right this time. Don’t make me rely on a DocType definition to avoid IE’s Quirks mode.
Get rid of quirks mode, just render pages as they are coded, bad coders will learn to do something we all need to do.. DEBUGGING.
Fix floats. I get inconsistent results and extra spaces underneath.
I should NEVER need to use the "height 1%" hack, yet its all over my web application.
I want true PNG support with full transparency – this was slated to be fixed with IE 4 but never was. WHY????
:hover should apply more elements than just links.
min-height, max-height, min-width, max-width, Support for these would be great!!!!!!!!!
William: when you say ‘getting your site to work’ do you mean ‘getting it to look good’ or actually getting it to function? If the former, which is what I suspect you may mean, then might I suggest that you don’t bother? If the site simply doesn’t look as good in IE6 but is still accessible then why not do what I did with my personal site a year or so ago and just give up on the appearance in IE? My site looks a bit of a dog’s breakfast in IE, because it uses bits of CSS2 which aren’t supported, but it works just fine. That’s what CSS is supposed to do – degrade gracefully.
[Yes, I know some may consider it looks a dog’s breakfast in other browsers too but that’s purely down to my lack of design skills]
The button tag has been mentioned already. However I think I should emphasize that it’s not just a layout problem…
IE sends back the content of the <button> tag instead of its value. To make matters worse: if there is more than one button in the form, it behaves as if every button had been pressed, i.e. it sends back the name/content pair for all buttons in the form. So it’s impossible to find out which button actually was clicked.
- make ActiveX optional
- support SVG
I would like to see more support for embedded tables and media. In every browser I use (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, IE2) to test IE is the only one that misinturprets tables and their layout. I normally wrap my pages in one table and embed additional tables to align content. When I define an embedded table as width="100%" it gets scrunched into 20%, while no other browser does this.
Perhaps Apple is to blame for this one, as it works in no other browsers either, but an embedded Quicktime file does not play through Apache on port 80. Regardless, no usable error messages appear, nothing, just a broken plugin image. It took quite a bit of troubleshooting to figure out it was a port issue. The errors should be much more informative, especially for developers.
Support HTML 4.01 fully and CSS fully. Is that so hard?
Quite a flurry of comments here! Instead of adding to the currently running thread, here’s my short list of "like to haves" for IE7 (in no particular order):
* HTML 4.01
* CSS 2 (including box-sizing)
* XHTML 1.1
* ECMAScript for XML (E4X)
* application/xhtml+xml mime type
* DOM 2 Event Model
* SVG 1.0
Please don’t be discouraged by some of the responses on this blog, a lot of us appreciate the open channel of communication.
My thoughts on the commenting for this blog:
Hi – I work as an ASP.Net developer in the Custom Web Solutions department for a web hosting company. I fully understand and support the need for backwards compatibility, but it would be really great if Microsoft would take the lead in bringing the browser to a new level. Innovation doesn’t have to come from just the open source community.
With that in mind, I’d love to see:
* support for SVG as a native file format – vector graphics gives us so much more that we can do – and Flash has a lot of limitations for data-driven apps.
* support for PNG graphics and JPEG2000 – way long overdue – the gif file format was created by Compuserve back in 1200 Baud days for goshsakes.
* support for fixed positioning.
* better JavaScript debugging and error reporting. I end up using Firefox (and previously Navigator) to debug JavaScript.
I’m sure I will think of others. Thanks for giving us an opportunity to blue sky this. I hope you all look at this as a great opportunity to move things forward.
All right, I’ve read enough. Skipped 1/5 of the comments.
You should realize a few things before you start writing more IE code.
1. If you include XAML/Avalon in IE7, the web developer community will be seriously pissed off. At least I will. Mozilla’s inclusion of XUL is different, as it’s an open spec that’s even been proposed to the W3C. XAML, although XML-based, is in my eyes no better than ActiveX.
2. The web developer community are the ones who make the internet. If you turn them against you, you as browser vendors will be in big trouble. How is your damn browser going to read a web that doesn’t want to be read?
3. You say you’re committing. You haven’t committed to anything except vague promises. If you don’t include CSS2, if you play God and pretend that you’re the ones fit to decide what the entire web has to obey, then you will turn the web developer community against you, which leads us back to point 2.
4. You haven’t done anything but keep everyone in the dark ever since you said you’d release IE7. People’s jobs and hobbies could be dramatically affected by this stuff, so you should with respect for other people let them know what’s happening.
If you truly commit to web standards, I will be in awe. I might even start using your browser again, as long as you guys don’t ruin the hobbies and jobs of millions of people around the world by wanting "backwards compatibility". How about some damn forwards compatibility? Mozilla seemed to get both right, didn’t they?
You’ve basically been stepping on the web developer community these last 4 years. You have a chance now to redeem yourself and give all your fancy words some meaning. DO something, for crissake. You know what: standards support. XHTML, MIME-types, CSS (not necessarily CSS3) SVG, SMIL … If you need to know more about them, this is an excellent place:
I agree, along with the numerous others above, that this post is basically more fluff that does little to address any of our concerns about standards compliance in IE7. Information elsewhere indicates there will be a beta of IE7 sometime later this year. The time for asking for suggestions has long past, the time for telling us what you will actually deliver is here. Please, please do so.
Finally, why are you, a MS employee, (or anyone else for that matter) referring to the non-MS sites you list for "descriptions of problems in the field". It infuriates me that I can’t go to a MS resource to find out about issues and bugs in IE’s implementations of standards. I shouldn’t have to trawl around all over the web to figure out why my valid design doesn’t work on IE. Though I’d love to see expanded standards support (i.e. proper CSS1, CSS 2.1, PNG, DOM events, HTML 4.01, XHTML, HTTP, etc) by biggest request is that you please provide resources for me to find out about problems with your implementation. Since you indicate you plan to add new specs to IE 7, you will undoubtedly also introduce new bugs. I want info on those bugs and resolutions to them coming from MS not Joe Smo on the web. No insult intended to the folks who provide the wonderful resources you reference.
Also I’m quoting from way above, but didn’t want to let this one."
No, the backwards thinking is having to think about coding to a platform. What we, the ones complaining here, would like is to be able to code to "the standard" not the "quasi-standard" (which isn’t standard at all, a standard would me implemented across platforms not defined by a single one).
My biggest problem is that there is no unique identifier passed for each instance of a web browser.
Without this, it makes it extremely difficult to use a server session to help track the user’s path through the website as they may have two web browser instances (that have one cookie that identifies one server session).
Hey, how about support for transparent png.
lol whoever posted as Bruce… good for a chuckle.
In the big picture, no one likes hearing a load of excuses, and no one likes not having choices. Here in NYC you will rarely find anyone running IE anymore, it’s just known to be inferior. People are switching to Macs in droves. I hope the lesson learned is that you can only strong arm people for so long.
My main suggestion for IE7: give me a way to uninstall the damn thing in the event that I have to use a Wintel box.
Looks like its time to start moderating comments again… thanks to people posing as Bruce and Chris… Maybe having registration to post blog comments isn’t a bad idea after all…
I modified my personal weblog and I find another problem with IE: It doesn’t support dotted borders, but only dashed borders, the weblog looks absolutely different (and very ugly) with dashed borders. So, as someone already had, I ask You to include dotted borders support.
Thanks!
Great list N.Zakas — E4X would be a nice present!
How about some user-interface wishes? I would be freaking jumping up and down if IE had:
(*) Definable shortcut keys ala Visual Studio. Why must ctrl-P print? It’s too close to ctrl-O and ctrl-L… if it was redefinable, I wouldn’t be hitting print so many times when fat-keying open window.
(*) Do "find text" like firefox. Since ie6xpsp2, there are already times IE takes over a bit of browser real-estate to let me know it won’t do a popup, run activeX, etc. Take over a little space at the bottom when "find" is started
(*) More text size options than just the smallest->largest currently in IE.
(*) A "best guesser" for 404s. Again with the bad typing skills, if I type in "ww.microsoft.com" or "" the browser should make some best guesses for common mistakes after getting a bad url, and direct me to that site (and tell you of the change of course)… There must be hundreds of common spelling mistakes for "www" and "com"… for that matter, I’ve also screwed up and typed "www,microsoft,com" once or twice too — this is an easy conversion
(*) Ability to delete parts of a document after retrieving it. This is mainly for printing or saving to disk. It would be nice to be able to mark a large portion of a document and delete it from the local document prior to printing.
(*) Sticky "Save As" option – I always save pages as HTML only, so the default being set to Web Page complete is a hassle.
(*) More document information in properties. Did the web page start an ActiveX control? Did it request/set cookies? What were they? Start Java, Javascript?
This might be too much information for the average user, but if it was buried in an advanced or more info button in properties they’d never see it anyway
(*) Last modified date/time for internet options, and maybe a rollback feature?
I’m a web developer. I work all day with CSS and Flash, among other things, and I find myself and my colleagues feeling restricted more and more on each and every project by IE. I’m pretty versed in my browsers. I always use the !important tags and simple math to code for IE’s padding and border quirks on the fly, without any thought at all. I ignore position:absolute, :first-child [as well as ALL other selectors], dotted lines, and certain floating scenarios because I know they won’t work in IE. I also ignore fscommand and window mode in Flash because it won’t work in the Gecko browsers. On occasion, I have to add dummy tables around div sets for Mac IE, and when something just isn’t working, position:relative somehow fixes it. I have extra lines of code in all my JavaScripts to handle the differences between IE and Gecko. On occasion we revert to JavaScript rollovers when a client complains about the flashing of :hover items. Sometimes I include an additional style sheet if I detect MSIE Win to hack some things. I refuse to use rich text forms on a page without a plain text alternative for Safari. Everything always validates, and guess what? I work exclusively on a Mac, and have since I can remember. I don’t even check my layouts on the damn Windows box cause I already know what can’t be done and what it will look like.
You know, there’s always going to be differences and problems. It’s always going to take that much longer. Of course if we could all get along, our lives would likely be rich, peaceful and bountiful. But we can’t, and nature drives business… and business is definitely Microsoft.
BUT that feels like giving up. If the desired result is to build on and improve internet technology, inspire innovation in web and application design, and expand on the way in which content is delivered and perceived, then we need change fast. What if IE conformed to the W3C standards better than the competition? What if fscommand worked in Firefox? What if I could use a flipping PNG without importing an IE alpha transform? People get stuck in the past. People want the future, now – they want to go online and pay their bills, find love, new jobs, and fast cars — but they aren’t willing to shell out the cash for the Windows upgrade or the pretty PowerBook. And who can blame them? They were told they could do that stuff with what they bought already.
So now they want me to make it work. "I’ll try… someone must have a hack for IE somewhere." (Or, fair enough, the worst is "I’ll find a hack for OS 9 somewhere." Damn advertising firms…)
IE6 is hugely dominant. It will be for a very long time. It would be so wonderful and inspiring to hear that the next release of IE (7) was going to have at least the amount of support for CSS and image formats as Safari ( — selectors aren’t listed, don’t know why). If not for immediate satisfaction, at least I could relax and recline for a minute thinking about how much more fun my job will be in THREE YEARS when IE7 has as big of a penetration in the marketplace as 6 does now. Now that would be awesome, I could enjoy my job the way I did when HTML 3.2 was standard and the best of the best used rowspans. Although… I do remember white space problems that still exist today — let’s keep ignoring those.
Or, Microsoft could continue to hold the nose in the air, whining about how CSS2 is stupid because if something is defined as 100 pixels wide with a padding of 20 pixels, it should still be 100 pixels wide. For the record, I agree, but the W3C has spoken. I’m sure selectors are for lazy developers who haven’t purchased IIS and ASP, and I bet fixed positioning would just result in a lot of ugly popup ads and home-brewed web sites reminiscent of frames. I can guarantee the average ill-informed computer user would select [a false sense of] security over a standardized web development language.
Either way, until we get a clear answer, I’ll continue to vocally express my support for Firefox and Mac OS X to clients and friends. They listen to us. It will spread, and you can’t stop it, you can’t ignore it, and if you start the next iteration of this legacy without recognition of what we need and want, then it will surely be burnt in the blaze. If you’re so worried about backwards-compatibility, call up the Xbox 2 department and try explaining your thoughts to them.
Have a nice day, and focus as much time on selectors as business-ly possible.
Start simple: the CSS-Attribute "height". unlike the near but not equal "min-height" you implemented instead. just plain old boring "height". that would suffice. but well, maybe it was a typo…
There are a lot of good comments here, especially from people insightful enough to see that you’ve written a lot, without saying much. Obviously the entire web development community are crossing our fingers and hoping you will actually commit to making ie a standards compliant browser rather than the bane of our existence. Here is my quick list:
complete CSS 2.1 support
:hover on all elements
position: fixed
ie whitespace bug
floats
selectors: dynamic pseudo class, before/after, child/adjacent
min/max width/height
counters
CSS 3
border-radius
PNG with alpha channel
SVG support
MS would seem to have a good reason for not supporting all these standards – they bring us closer to a non-desktop based applications. Technologies such as XForms and SVG are designed to allow easy implementation of application-like functionality via the web browser and MS would be silly to allow that to flourish, when they make most of their income from the desktop and associated apps.
Molly E. Holzschlag provides an update on the progress made between Microsoft and the Web Standards Project…
Please please PLEASE…..
1) Fully support CSS2, especially :hover, :first-letter, etc. There is so much extra markup and js I have to write to emulate these things.
2) Full PNG support w/alpha and accurate colors
3) Box model
4) Stabilize DOM-based js. Did you know that the browser will crash if you try to add a child node from a popup to the parent (such as adding form data to a table cell)?
5) Get SVG in the works for version 8.
6) Stabilize float renderings
7) Fix the a:hover background image swap flicker. I know there’s an easy hack, but still…
As a web-based applications developer with heavy DHTML use, I find IE extremely difficult to code for without relying on proprietary code that has to be forked. Additionally, failure to support some of the "cooler" CSS features results in excessive code and debugging. PNG would be a godsend for truly transparent image backgrounds without jagged edges.
Kudos for finally addressing this matter, but please don’t wait so long next time!
A very simple but desireable standard; when IE first opens, its Address field should have the focus. (Presently, no field has focus)
The reason for opening the browser is to access a web site, either by typing into the Address field or clicking on a Favorites icon. Please make it easy to begin typing immediately without mousing around.
Thanks for your renewed IE polishing efforts!
Let me start by stating I am a standards advocate all the way down to my little toe.
A theory:
MS would seem to have a good reason for not supporting all these standards – they bring us closer to a decentralised, non-desktop based applications.
Technologies such as XForms and SVG are designed to allow easy implementation of application-like functionality via the web browser and MS would be silly to allow that to flourish, when they make most of their income from the desktop and associated apps. Their only answer would be to gain a controlling share of this ‘online-application’ market. The MS answer seems to be XAML, not web standards.
At the same time, they can’t be seen to be holding back the development of the internet (which is what they seem to be doing). So they buy time by giving us the line that they have to prioritise security issues. This may be so, but they’ve had at least 4 years to do something with standards support and haven’t so something doesn’t add up.
It doesn’t seem to be in their best interests to promote these standards.
I would like to point out that repeatedly impersonating myself, Dave Massy, and Bruce will quickly force us to moderate comments or require registration.
I dont mind the odd work-around to make things work in css (although they really shouldnt be necessary), the one thing that frustrates the hell out of me, is that ie6 mac and pc both render differently.
How does that work???
surely u can meet a set of standards with 2 of your own products??
Everyone’s elses comments are spot on, e.g.
1. CSS2.1 (CR sections of CSS3, like psuedo selectsors, border radius and columns),
2. XHTML when served with an xml header (and the <!? xml prolog),
3. Fixing box model and other major quirks are all spot on
Something else that would provide an edge would be similar to the exclamation mark shown when Javascript errors occur.
Have two more icons for the well-formedness of (X)HTML and CSS; mousing over the XHTML icon might say "XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 2 errors" or "No doctype; using HTML 4.01 in Quirks Mode". The CSS icon would simply state if any errors existed (including unrecognised declarations).
Double-clicking on the icons would bring up a list of all problems with line numbers, much the same way as the validators on W3C.
Similar tools exist for FireFox, but not everyone uses FireFox. Having this in IE would immediately improve adherence and adoption of standards. In time, users would expect ticks for all new websites, and that these checks become more comprehensive (e.g. moving towards basic areas of WCAG)
Ofcourse, this rests on IE correctly interpreting and dealing with those specifications. (However, wouldn’t it be an honest approach for the system to produce a warning such as "This feature is not implemented fully" on certain CSS constructs?).
My name really is Chris Wilson, is it ok to use it?
Why not use the KHTML engine. Apple is improving it and submitting it back to the community for use in Konquerer. Imagine if Microsoft got involved, all three major platforms could work on improving the same rendering engine. It would be fantastic. We would have cross platform support for all the same standards. You truly could develop for just one browser and know you can reach all users.
CSS2 is important, but I would like to see IE properly support XHTML. In particular, I would like to see:
-support for "id=" bookmark references; i can’t make pages XHTML 1.1 compliant because of this
-proper support for the xhtml indicator tag <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> at the start of the page; IE reverts to a specialized mode when this is on page and this can change how the page is displayed
Joseph: I’d hazard a guess that using KHTML would take too long to get working on Windows.
Gecko is already working on windows.
Other needs:
* A Date, for when ActiveX will be fully dropped from IE. (This is an Absolute requirement, so we know how long we have to get rid of this swiss cheese security issue)
* Support for font-family, font-size, font-style, in <option> tags…
* Support for 508+ character Bookmarks
* Support for 1 (one) bookmark file… not the chaos IE has now
* Support for view-source, with ANYTHING OTHER THAN NOTEPAD… the worlds WORST TEXT EDITOR.
* Support for all the stuff that every other browser has had over the last 3 years, that you guys were too lazy to implement.
PS, push the alpha ship date from this summer, to next. You won’t be ready, don’t tease us… the last thing we want to have to suport is 5 different versions of IE7 Alpha/Beta.
Siggy… Nice one. LOL
AS IF Microsoft would admit such things without blaming the USER first.
I say forget em.
Let’s just all move on to FF. It works better anyway. And they listen.
SUN Microsystems should team up with FF to make all Java Script work in FF. Then they would own the market in no time. Or even take away Java Scripting from Microsoft all together for a dramatic end to IE, the problem maker.
Transparent PNG’s please.
Some of the problems…
float
float
float
float
float
100%
overflow
anyway you look at it, ms may say whatever I know the standards game is just a game(and annoyingly, firefox wins almost every round) and their biggest problem is having the current and the old versions behave the way they should behave. that is an impossible task considering the amount of projects tweaked to work how they are supposed to be working. those projects won’t "behave" as "intended" should ie behave itself.
behold the behavior…
Pfffffffffffffff…
What a very blank blog.
That’s just a crappy commercial talk.
Microsoft NEVER had (nor it will have) in mind to well implement standards.
To all commenters: let’s face the reallity.
Microsoft only have in mind to make money.
And be compatible with stanards would simplify the life of web developers but MS don’t care: it would allow users to switch browsers easily and, it will mostly deprecate upcoming Microsoft technologies (Avalon/XAML/.Net…).
It’s much better for MS to make web developers life a nightmare if they choose to use standards AND to make life quite easy if they choose to use MS only technologies => surfers will be obliged to use MS browser(s), and then MS Windows, etc…
Hey, the browser war is not ended at all.
And MS has not changed since Netscape/IE war.
With Firefox, MS is acting the same play as it was playing with other competitors.
This IE7 release is the same as it was with IE4 and so: marketing, delaying, "proprietaring" and killing evryone.
I know I look like a fool posting the same exact requests as everyone else, but in the end MS will be the fool for releasing an IE7 that doesn’t support most of these requests.
PNG24 transparancy support,
Full CSS 2.1 (I shouldn’t have to use a hack again because it should look the same as other W3C compliant browsers…right?)
Full DOM support
I don’t care if it takes a long time to release it, we can do with IE6 for a little while, but IE7 must blow everyone away.
And CSS3 support should come right after the standard’s release…and don’t act like it’s nothing because it will eventually come out and we’ll be at stage 0 again.
It’s the browser that has like 90% of the market I’m surprised it can do so little compared to other browsers.
Hasn’t anyone in MS noticed that when you’re working one something on the web you have like 20 windows open? Tabbed navigation should be there!
Yes, of course you may use the name "Chris Wilson" if it’s really yours. I will be more explicit about remembering to put [MSFT] on the end of my name.
To All: we’ve now deleted the posts intending to impersonate myself, Dave and Bruce, and (unfortunately) all the obvious replies to that. My apologies to those whose posts were deleted as aftermath – my intent was not to stifle discussion, but make it clear that that statement did not come from Microsoft. Please play by the rules of good conduct or we will have to moderate the comments or require registration for this blog, which in my personal opinion would suck..
BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL!
Respect the "Content-Type" header please.
In more, less exciting, Microsoft news… CSS Support Could Be Internet Explorer’s Weakest Link: "The company will continue to drag its feet by refusing to provide full support for the CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 2) W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium)…
When I give talks about markup, I single out two failures of IE W3C compliance:
1. Failure to support CSS rendering for the ABBR tag. The current workaround is to either contain non-acronym abbreviations within SPAN tags, or use the semantically absurb markup of containing an abbreviation within an ACRONYM tag. (Acronyms are a subclass of abbreviations. Abbreviations are a superclass of acronyms.)
2. Failure to support CSS rendering of quotation marks for the Q tag. The only workaround here is to reference HTC files to provide this feature for IE without causing double sets of quotations in compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera, etc.
While the ABBR and Q tags may not be well-known or commonly used at sites like MSDN, they are critical for all literature-related sites where dialogue, for example, is a major portion of the content. (And, unbeknownst to most developers, other countries use different quotations delimiters than we do!)
See "The Best Markup That Never Was" at:
I think most of the posters here are skeptical, but it’s worth a shot. If they ultimately ignore us, we’re only out a few minutes and some keystrokes.
As for making their new technologies obsolete…how does supporting DOM, CSS, graphic formats, and XML preclude support for other additional technologies? (Though I’d love to see it get disentangled from the OS and ActiveX kicked to the curb for security reasons.)
Moz has XUL and some other stuff they are working on…the point with IE standards is that what ought to be basic functionality based on W3C standards (which last I knew MS helped to create) is missing, creating massive headaches for developers and often resulting in stripped down user experience because it is too much hassle to make it dynamic.
I really don’t see how complying to W3C standards kills other technologies. They’re add-ons to functionality that we can take or leave as developers. But lack of standards support is a true hinderance to productivity.
Here’s an idea: use the gecko rendering engine if a page has a doctype. Everything else stays in quirks mode. I know it’s not that simple, but it would be nice…
Chris are you (or actually WERE you) involved in the Mac Version of IE. Why was its standards implementation even worse than that of IE for windows. Further more why did it not share the rendering engine from IE for Win. Seems like it would have been better to just port it over and be done with it.
Why did Microsoft decide to kill it rather than fix it?
Full CSS 2 support would truly be a major help. Other feature requests that would be of benefit is a cleaner API for IE. Using interop for IE is a nightmare right now in .NET applications. It would also be nice to have more control over and interaction with the Web Extender Client.
Thanks!
Luc> [SUN Microsystems should team up with FF to make all Java Script work in FF. ]
FYI SUN Microsystem is in no way affiliated with Javascript, their turf is Java, Javascript is completely 100% independant from Java and standardized by the ECMA as ECMA-262 "ECMAScript" ().
This is a common misconception caused by the somewhat close names, but Javascript has no relation with Java and doesn’t "inherit" from it.
What about transparent PNG?
Can you guys answer us?
guys why do you even care about (officially monitored and cleared ?) blogs on MSDN.com????
Ooo…another one….
Change the way scrollbars are calculated on elements. Putting an element, like a table, inside a scrolling div is a real hassle (this goes for Moz, too, and both browsers calculate differently), cuz you have to specify pixel widths for everything to get the table to fix exactly within the div, which makes extra code to change for resizing. Kills my ability to create a fluid, relative layout that can be automagically resized for different screen resolutions without duplicating many parts of my CSS.
Web standards are just a suggestion, they do not need to followed to the "t"… Not even Firefox or Opera are 100% web standards compliant, but they are certainly making great strides to become 100%. With Firefox (and Opera to an extent), you can see the daily progress and bugs being fixed. Such browsers are popular because they are endless "betas" if you would, constantly improving functionality and web standards support.
We never did get an answer about the transparent PNG support?
Chris? Rather than taking the time to respond to trolls, why not answer this question?
Most have been covered, but
Please properly support, at the very least…
png (alpha) & fix that pesky 3px discrepancy, so I can get rid of those IE conditionals in my page heads!
For IE7 & the Handheld/MobileIE…
max-width:, min-width:
media=screen, media=handheld etc. for multiple stylesheets!
Simple tags for different stylesheets/devices, is the coolest thing since html!
The IE in Mobile2003 is sad.
You better fix that MobileIE before Opera releases one too. Their small screen rendering rocks!
If you guys were to actually do, what you know needs done? I can honestly say, I will never speak another bad word about M$, or type MS as M$ as long as I live! lol
My eternal reply will be…. "Yeah, but they fixed their CSS support!" =)
@Chris Wilson [Yes, the REAL one]
"so that we can stay on the topic of improving the standards in the current IE implementation."
Why don’t you respond then to what MSFT’s (without a $) standpoint on improving standards is. So many lists have been noted here, but no response on that from you guys.
Compliments btw for exposing yourselves this way. But tell me, did you hear anything *new* ?
Chris Wilson [MSFT] wrote:
."
Following that unusual request for our input, numerous responders have posted helpful examples of real life CSS code problems that need to be resolved to make website CSS coding a friendlier occupation, while others have taken this as an opportunity to bash the company for its slowness to change.
This is a rare opportunity for the little guy to have a say and maybe help to make a change in the way layout codes are rendered by the most popular browser in use, worldwide. I guarantee that negative comments and Microsoft bashing will not help this endeavour.
That said, I don’t recall reading much here about the benefits to the end users of viewing websites that are truly standards compliant (with backwards compatibility for the corporate users mentioned by Chris). I’d like to fill that gap here.
One thing that I have learned personally is that by converting my websites from frames and layout tables into strictly using CSS Positioned Divs, I have cut down the page load times by magnitudes. Internet visitors have less patience today than they did when I started surfing the brand new Internet in the mid 1990’s, with the Moziac browser. They don’t want to sit around waitng for table cells to be drawn, or unoptimized images to download. CSS-P coded pages, with optimized graphics can load in a fraction of the time of the old table laden layouts of yesteryear. The better the support that the major browser gives to CSS-P, the faster we can get our content to the majority of end users.
We, the Webmasters, are trying to write better, cleaner codes, learning the most current W3C Recommendations and Final Release codes for CSS and HTML (and XHTML). It is discouraging to have gone to all this trouble to study correct coding standards only to learn that they do not work as designed in the browser used by the majority of end users. When we type a URL of a project webpage into the W3C CSS and HTML Validators it often comes back with numerous errors, usually related to proprietary IE codes, or work-around IE hacks we inserted into our stylesheets.
Yet we persist and learn work-arounds so that our viewers can benefit from these CSS Positioning techniques and see our fast loading websites, and stay long enough to get to know us, or buy something from us.
If IE was to be upgraded to a stronger CSS-2 (especially regarding CSS-P) level of compliance the end users would benefit by even faster loading pages, since we wouldn’t have to add code-bloat in the form of IE-only hacks. Not everyone is using broadband. There are millions of dialup Netizens upon whom we depend to make our day. They want websites to load more quickly, display properly, be readable and make sense to the eye. All this can be accomplished with a stricter implementation of published CSS-2 standards in Internet Explorer.
Webpages written using positioned DIVs and floated elements will render faster and are better indexed by search engines. More important content can be placed in the uppermost DIVs and fixed or absolute positioning can display that content next to sidebars, whose content is typed farther down the page, code-wise. It is of the utmost importance that some meaningful, readable content appears in the first critical few seconds after the Netizen lands on our webpages. If all they see is a blank (unoptimized, non-compliant, bloated) page trying to load, they will move elsewhere.
There have always been alternative browsers available, but the majority of people don’t know or care about them. AOLers use what they are given by AOL. It is driven by the IE engine. If Microsoft upgrades the CSS support of that engine almost all of the AOL members will be fed the upgrade as they log off. They are used to this behaviour from AOL, for years now. Anytime they come to a website that is written with CSS standards that site will load faster than one that is full of CSS hacks or tables.
The rest of the World could receive upgrades via automatic or manual Windows Updates. If the entire Windows Media Player can be upgraded in one download session and a reboot, why not Internet Explorer? There must be lots of talented browser coders out there who would chomp at the bit to work for Microsoft to help develop and deploy a fully CSS-2 compliant browser (and actually get paid for their efforts).
Future CSS recommendations will allow developers to write webpages that rival magazines, newspapers, and books in layout techniques. Hopefully, Microsoft will choose to be a leader, rather than a follower, in the quest for better layouts. If the current Strict DocType switches IE into almost-standards mode, let’s fix the bugs and make it full standards mode. Later on a new DocType declaration could switch it into CSS-3 mode, once that recommendation is finalized by the W3C.
Just my .02
Wiz
Firstly, I want to thank Microsoft for deploying this blog and listening to the development community. I think we can all agree that it’s a positive move and very brave on their part considering the current reputation of IE and bad feeling towards MS among web developers.
Despite the recent progress made by Opera and Mozilla I’m still using IE6 on a day to day basis. Security wise, it’s pretty easy to lock down a PC with decent anti-virus and anti-spyware software. It’s a good idea to do so even if you’re using a relatively robust browser like Firefox. SP2 was a step in the right direction too. The main reason I use IE is because I like simple, uncluttered software and with a bit of tweaking you can get it as basic as Safari (which incidentally is my favorite browser).
I would agree with most of comments above – although I can’t quite help thinking that we’re missing the point slightly. Most of us are in the business of creating content and applications that are accessed via web-browsers.
The vast majority of the new standards as far as I can tell help simplify the process of authoring pages, simplify the process of delivering content to different platforms or reduce the complexity of code required to achieve more interesting presentational effects. However, most of the stuff you guys are asking for can already be achieved using hacks or a bit of Javascript. What will our customers and end users actually see a result of this big drive for web standards?
New features? Richer content? I have seen little evidence of this so far. Remember guys, if you’re really serious about using these new standards you can get up and running with Dean Edward’s IE7 scripts. That guy is a genius. Sure, there are some compromises involved but it does mean that you can start delivering these new features to your customers. Just about the only example I’ve seen of something that can only be achieved with the latest version of CSS is the complex spiral demo.
Cheaper development costs? I think the idea that cross browser compatibility takes large amounts of time is a myth. In my job I am involved in delivering hugely complex browser based applications for large corporations. We try to support IE5.5, Firefox and Safari as best we can. Once you are familiar with the quirks you can work around them. I was involved in web development back in the early IE vs. Netscape days and we have it easy now compared to those days. Although IE is not _strictly speaking_ standards compliant, it is close enough to allow us to use the technologies we need to. A few years ago CSS was practically useless due to poor support in Netscape.
Smaller page sizes? Yes, but the biggest step with this was CSS which is now used almost universally. Any further improvement is going to be much more marginal.
I’m interested to see what the next step is for the web. What can we do with these new technologies that will benefit end users and our customers? I am sure there is an answer to this question and it certainly doesn’t involve PNG alpha channels or box models.
Personally I don’t care what is going to be supported/not-supported in IE7 if it’s not total support. Currently my sites are standards-compliant, with IE getting its own stylesheet via IE proprietary conditional comments. Partial support for standards means going through and adding hacks to all of my pages.
Does anyone have any tips or previews into what CSS IE is NOT supporting so I can get a heads-up on what new hacks I’ll have to learn?
siggy,
what a great idea, that would push standards for sure.
I dont think there is any point on ragging on existing microsoft software.. it cant be undone only improved.. as web developers and designers we have to challenge MS to come to the party…
CSS2 and FULL PNG Support – Thats what im talking about
Let’s remember that they need to keep the option to render crappy code for compatibility with FrontPage and VisualStudio.net’s week HTML output.
How can Microsoft build such a strong IDE (VS.Net) and then have it output such awful HTML.
Still no answer on the PNG’s? How many people have to ask?
As I read through all the articles spawned by the IE7 announcement (press release), I finally realized something: IE6 is the new Netscape 4.7x. We all woke up one day, and IE6 had suddenly become the browser that is…
What about IE and its HTTP headers being sent more effectively?
Currently, IE 6 (XP Home SP 2) sends out the ‘Accept’ header with a value of just ‘*/*’ which seems to indicate that IE is saying ‘I support everything and anything’, which isn’t the case. The ‘Accept-Charset’ header doesn’t seem to exist either.
While playing about with content negotiation with the ‘application/xhtml+xml’ string with Firefox and PHP, it made me realise that this could be used on a larger scale if IE played ball. Being able to see which content types the browser can support could allow web developers to be more specific with the content types they send.
Having any plug-ins also report themselves when installed would also be a bonus. For example, if someone installs the adobe PDF reader plug-in, then the ‘accept’ header should have its MIME type added to the header (application/pdf I believe?), or if an SVG plug-in becomes available, IE should send that MIME type as well (application/svg+xml I think?).
The ‘User-Agent’ string could be looked at as well. If what I hear is accurate, the IE team altered this to read ‘Mozilla/4.0’ to prevent IE from being locked out of Netscape only pages (is this story correct?). Seeing as this probably isn’t a problem any more, could IE start reporting itself in a simpler manor? For example, just ‘MSIE 7; XP Home SP2’.
Apparently it’s difficult to do proper alpha composition natively in Trident due to the way the engine works. Although my knowledge on this is limited it looks like it farms alpha PNGs and colours out to the DirectX engine via the use of ‘CSS’ filters.
I have only *one* question for Microsoft guys :
« Why do you still not support transparent PNGs ? »
I can understand for CSS and co. that your programers are lazy or IE code is too cluttered because your programers are not fitted with a brain…
But PLEASE : don’t let me die before I have this question answered !
That’s very strange : it’s implemented in an ActiveX and only a few lines of code to add (perhapse only one to modify) would bring this support NATIVLY.
That’s so strange that I KNOW it’s on purpose.
But WHAT PURPOSE ?
I thinked to every possible aims but can’t get a valid one…
Please light me because I can’t sleep very well without a response
Are you loving so much to program that when a thing can be made without any line of code (add an image, make a rollover with CSS, fixed background image) you force web developers to program (make JavaScript for rollovers to work…) ?
You are perhapse right : nowaday being a developer is TOO easy, so you complicate things. Thank you and keep up the good work
There are quite a few skeletons in the CSS closet. Most are caused by browser specific implementations. To that regard, it is easy (and trendy) to blame IE for being the largest deviator from accepted implementation standard.
I’m not a CSS guru and am still learning, but why am I forced to use tables to be able to vertically align block level elements? Sure I can use postition: relative and specify the height and width of the element, but I have to go through countless hoops just to get the thing to center vertically. They can’t all be implementation problems. CSS2 has no easy way to center things vertically.
It is not easy to deal with and non-intuitive.
Most everything else about CSS I like. I like the seperation of presentation and content.
If IE does decide to implement some standards, add to those standards and expand the vertical align property to apply to ALL block level elements.
Thanks for reading.
I’m glad to see IE7 underway and available for WinXP. I would like to say you guys are acting like saints! Even some of these comments that you didn’t delete have a very angry/insulting tone. And I’m glad you guys created this Blog to keep the developer community aware of your progress, and for feedback.
Chris, you mentionned in your initial post that you want specific requests for standards and will not accept stuff like CSS3. How about working closely with the W3C to get the CSS3 spec finalized and then work to support it?
I’d also like to suggest a similar tactic for WebForms 2.0.
thx!
If CSS support is to be improved (bug fixes as well as new additions), then I think there needs to be some sort of continued method to applying styles to different versions of IE and other web browsers.
Currently, web developers can pass CSS declarations exclusively to Internet Explorer via a universal selector bug, where by using a universal selector on the root element (html) is parsed only by Internet Explorer. For example:
* html body p {
color: red; /* Internet Explorer only. */
}
Via this method, web developers can filter styles for IE 6 and below using the Tantek hack (or the Box Model Hack). For example
* html body p {
color: red /* All IE’s read this. */
voice-family: “”}””;
voice-family: inherit; /*IE 5.5 and below stop. */
color: blue; /*IE 6 only read this. */
}
And using child selectors enables us to pass styles to browsers other than Internet Explorer. For example:
* body>p {
color: black; /* non-IE browsers see this. */
}
The thing is, when IE 7 comes out, are we left with no method of filtering styles to it?
I’ve been thinking about this for a little while, and think that perhaps fixing the universal selector bug might be the best method. I feel that doing this would preserve web developer methods for filtering styles to older versions of Internet Explorer. This method would allow developers who wish to move forward with their CSS to continue filtering hacks through to IE 6, 5.5, 5, as well as now being able to have these hacks ignored by IE 7!
For example, developers could use the following as a filter for IE 7, 6 and 5.5 / 5:
* body p {
color: black; /* All browsers, inc IE 7, 6, 5.5 and 5 */
}
* html body p {
color: red /* IE 6 and below read this (not IE 7). */
voice-family: “”}””;
voice-family: inherit;
color: blue; /*IE 6 only read this. */
}
Of course, this filter would be designed purely as a means to work around bugs in older versions of the IE browser.
What do others think of this proposal? Good or bad?
(If anyone notices any mistakes I’ve made here, I’d appreciate any corrections).
IE 7 sounds stupid, why not call it IE Xtreme
Get the CSS Box propery fixed!
And support CSS 1 and 2.1 more!
Thank you.
1st law of business
LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
2nd law of business
DO WHAT YOU WANT TO FURTHER INCREASE THE MONOPOLY
3rd law of business
DISCOUNT 1st LAW IF YOU ARE MICROSOFT
So here’s a real problem faced by a developer caused by ie’s non-standards-compliant behavior:
By far the biggest problem that I have with ie is its infuriating tendency to guess an appropriate action when faced with a "text/plain" content type. This is in the context of an intranet project where I have to take a bunch of legacy reports (created as text files) and serve them up in the browser. Unfortunately, the politics don’t work out so that I have the pull to ask for client-side configuration changes; it all has to work with the standard ie setup.
The case we often see is that everything will be fine for most people but then occasionally someone will complain that on their desktop certain files open up in a totally different application, often notepad. (which can’t handle unix-style line endings. Cue the problem reports…) I’m sure you can see why this is happening – the particular file in question will happen to be name "something.log" on the server, and this particular user will have previously on his desktop double-clicked on a ".log" file and opened it in notepad. To make the website work for this user, we need to disable the file association on their pc. Remember again how the politics don’t allow for mandated client-side changes.
For now, we have implemented an ugly workaround whereby the server sends an extra header of [Content-Disposition: inline; file "something.log.txt"] with the file "something.log". Unfortunately, this has the nasty side-effect that when someone right-clicks on a link to "save target as" the suggested filenames end up having thos ugly "[1]" bits in them.
All of this could be fixed if internet-explorer accepted a "X-Disable-Mime-Sniffing: yes" header which meant "don’t do any mime-sniffing on this page; trust the server". It’d still be non-standard, but at least there’d be some way of making it work. If the same header would even go so far as to enable me to serve up html typed as text/plain and get the source instead of the rendered version, that’d be really nice.
I’m tired of "Gif"wrapped answers… I WANT PNG ALPHA TRANSPARENCY!
How can anyone especialy Jon Mittelhauser be on the side of non-standards support. I utterly refuse to design non-standard webpages and accept that some pages on my site are not fully complient but most are and the main page proudly displays the W3C buttons to that effect. Chris is obviously going to impliament standards complience into IE and I pity anyone given the burdon of improving IE for it will be no easy task. You can easily add .net/ActiveX support to other browsers like FF so why dosn’t MS just brand FF or licence the Opera browser code and add the relevent code support for Propriatary MS stuff like .NET. If .NET was released for use on alternative platforms that didn’t use IE then more people would use it. I can see the (dis)advantages of websites being able to access your computer e.g. WGA.
The printing is atrocious; specifically, it cuts off text as opposed to wrapping it, resulting in the big no-no of data loss. As an example, try printing any page from MSDN documentation. I’ve seen this happen on different printers at different workplaces for over 4 years now. I’ve got several bugs sitting in my queue at work saying "Printer Friendly cuts off the page", but I’ve had to put a Hold on them until I can come up with some means to get around this problem.
Chris H > The thing is, when IE 7 comes out, are we left with no method of filtering styles to it?
If IE7 is about as standards-compliant as Firefox or Opera 7.54 (or even – let’s dream – Opera 8) are when it’s released, you will NOT want it to interpret your hacks.
You’ll want it to behave exactly as a standard-compliant browser (when in standard mode that is, hacks should stay in quirks), because it won’t NEED the hacks anymore to do what you want it to…
(remember? your use CSS hacks because IE doesn’t behave as it should, if it does what’s the point of it reading the hacks?)
IE team: three cheers for you for your willingness to improve the standards support! Here are the top things I would ask for in an improved IE:
* Support for the <button> tag, which allows arbitrarily rich content such as images to be displayed on the "face" of the button, but the value remains hidden.
* Support for the application/xml+xhtml content type for XHTML documents.
* Support for CSS :first-child and :last-child selectors.
* Support for CSS + and > selector operators.
* Non-buggy negative margins. (Sometimes I see strange horizontal gaps as I scroll on a page where negative margins are present.)
* Support for CSS position:fixed.
* Correct support for CSS background-attachment:fixed, such that Eric Meyer’s complexspiral demo would work in IE.
* Support for CSS border-spacing in tables.
* A robust implementation of CSS floating.
* Correct default handling of horizontally overflowed block-displayed elements. Correct behavior is bleed-over, but IE stretches the box.
* Support for CSS min-height, min-width, max-height and max-width.
* Support for CSS :hover on any element.
* Support for CSS attribute selectors, including the pattern matching operators.
* Better support for CSS block display of <a href="…"> elements (see).
* object.prototype.foo=function(){…} should result in this working: document.getElementById(‘bar’).foo().
* Support for CSS element.foo.bar and element:foo:bar selector syntax.
* Full PNG support, including alpha transparency.
* Full CSS support for dotted borders. I often get dashed ones with IE when declaring dotted.
The team responsible for the development of Internet Explorer 7 (and previous versions) is talking quite openly about Internet Explorer and standards on the Web. Apparently this is quite an open discussion from them. I haven’t been tracking this blog and I have now added it to my subscriptions.
a) Allow <?xml declarations before doctype
Please, don’t break the doctype sniffing if a page turns out to be VALID XHTML.
b) And if possible, please implement the doctype as stated by SGML. Like adding my custom entities:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC yaddayadda [
<!ENTITY nl "
">
(more entities here)
]>
This should allow us to define our own entities, have a page that DOES validate and DOES work. Unfortunately, if i try to do this in IE, it goes back to quirks mode.
c) Finally, please give the EXACT content of InnerHTML. Everytime i feed an xhtml document i end up getting an HTML 4 one (with capitalized tags – ARGH!!!)
d) Get rid of the borders around HR tags.
Thank you very much.
BTW, have you thought about releasing the HTML rendering engine as Open Source? Look at what happened with Netscape/Mozilla. They opened the source, and woo hoo!
(You could dual-license it as GPL/proprietary like the MySQL guys did – that’ll make sure you lose no money
Microsoft guys: I appreciate your effort to reach out to the IE community. I think it’s a good idea to try to support the developers and users that use and promote IE, and ultimately make it a success in the marketplace. But the tight-lippedness really makes it feel like you guys are just fishing for ideas. In other words, it seems you float some vague promises about improvements, and analyze the feedback. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this helps you make the product better.
But it doesn’t feel like you are sincere about building a community: you are taking value from our comments, but aren’t reciprocating by giving us some value in return. If you would commit to specific features, then I could promote the improvements to the IE platform to my customers, and have ammunition against other developers trying to sell firefox (or whatever) specific solutions. This is real concern for me; web developers have a lot of pent up frusturations with the state of the web, and the progress of IE in the last several years.
It’s no wonder the comments get abusive: the readers are coming with sincere concerns over IE, seeing lots of great feedback being provided back to Microsoft, such as the great comment from Jim above. But there’s nothing coming back in the other direction. Really great comments that deserve response go unanswered.
I’m not a great developer but I try to follow the standards.. and then hack at it to get it to work for IE, sometimes adding javascript code to just make something dropdown (ick).
Anyway, don’t know if it’s been mentioned.. but .png support would be nice. Really nice.
Same with all the other wonderful standard things.. Like min/max-width, better working opacity and other things that don’t make me have to rip my page apart.
Just.. Just keep with the standards and you’ll have the advantage over every user because of it’s implementation in Windows.
And please, I beg of you guys to follow standards.
Please? This is a serious hazard to the internet right now otherwise. Everyone knows it.
If you guys are actually interested in maintaining Internet Explorer:
If it’s just gonna be like MsPaint and MsNotepad, it still needs to be secure.
If you’re gonna keep up, properly comply with at least:
HTML 4.01
CSS 2 or 2.1 at your discretion
XHTML 1.1
XML 1.0
PNG 1.0
HTTP 1.1
If you actually care about furthering the web, then also implement:
SVG 1.2 + RCC AND XAML
XForms
XSLT
XPath
XQuery
MNG and JNG
CSS3
If you can do that, even I would switch back. Honestly though guys, I don’t know why MS would invest in building such a browser. They have nothing to gain from it. In fact, they’d have a whole lot of respect to gain from just including Firefox as the default browser from Windows. Just my 2c.
Kyle: what you say about Microsoft not needing to support standards may well be true. But it doesn’t have to be. They can fully support CCS2, CSS3 etc. and still grab themselves a monopoly.’. My guess is that that’s exactly what they’re planning on doing, perhaps not with IE7 but certainly with whatever comes after it with Longhorn.
So, there are lots of hacked pages out there that depend upon peculiarities of IE to give an acceptable rendering when displayed in IE and to use the "standard" when displayed in other browsers. Some web sites may detect IE and serve up a page targeting IE’s implementation.
How should IE7 distinguish that a web page should be rendered according to the "standard" and ingnore the hacks? How will the web server know to serve a "standard" page when it sees the IE user agent? Keep in mind that adoption of IE7 will be limited to those using XP SP2 and subsequent operating systems.
If you are going to beef up your standards support in IE, and I believe you must if you have any real respect for the developer community, then you must also do something about the abominal code that is spewed forth from the MS authoring tools.
I’ve never developed with/for .NET, but some things I’ve seen come out of it is unbelievably bad, full of broken code and severe accessibility violations. Even if IE was 100% compliant, other MS products will still cause broken sites.
MS, not just IE, has a core problem with standards that must be addressed.
Pete wrote: "What they do is support the standards but add extensions which will only work on IE running on Windows."
I had the same thought, for about a MILLISECOND, until I realized that full standards support would be sufficient to most developers’ and users’ desires for AWESOME FEATURES.
Only a much smaller fraction than now would stay with IE for the relatively FEW extra benefits their proprietary extensions would yield.
No, MS will NEVER adequately support standards, because they are greedy, and MORE profit is more important to them than the human race having an effective means of communications.
Ooh, that coffee smell is pretty stong by now. Are you awake yet, dear developers?
.
I would like to see the new version of IE support CSS Psudo Classes for things other than just the <a> tag for instance. Can’t think of the other (X)HTML tags IE already supports for Psudo Classes off the top of my head right now (I think 1 or 2 more tags, my memory seems to be failing…). It would be great if IE 7 supported Psudo Classes for all tags. I do a lot of work where this could be very handy.
First, let me say that I applaud your efforts to focus on Standards. I hope you seriously implement them. It will make life for all web developers easier.
That said, I’ll echo the "Wish List" that others have listed:
1. Full PNG support with alpha transparancy
2. Full CSS 2 support. The list that Greg Reimer provides above is excellent. An IE browser with this level of CSS support would be a great help.
3. Enhance the built in MSHTML editor so it outputs cleaner, more standards compliant HTML. Right now it removes quotes, bumps everything to UPPER CASE, deletes comments, etc. It’s barely usable.
4. I’ll completely echo what Vinnie said:
"Get rid of quirks mode, just render pages as they are coded, bad coders will learn to do something we all need to do.. DEBUGGING."
This change alone would make your lives much, much easier. Stop trying to figure out what the developer meant, and just render what they coded. If they built the darn thing wrong, show it wrong. They’ll fix it and all is well. Otherwise we all have to work around the "quirks".
Thanks!
As I read this post I get this:
- You have to fix som security flaws
- You have to make som UI changes to look like an modern browser
- You have limeted resources and time (as a devloper I sure know this one…..)
- You *might* try to make IE a bit more web standards compliant *if* you have som time left after fixing #1 and #2
And reading all the comments here – the list that devlopers wants in on #4 is *long* – way to long…
As I see it – the only hope the webdevlopers have to see this list fixed in the next 10-15 years is if you do as some here have suggest: Use an open source renderer – Geco or (like Appel) KHTML – and put a few fulltime MS-devlopers on that project to "pay back" and help to make it get even better.
> There are also a number of considerable
> negatives from our perspective, particularly
> in compatibility with current content,
I *don’t* want compatibility with older IE renderers. I want IE to be standard compliant. Period.
> security
I think both Geco and KTHML hase a better security then IE. After all – this IE7 prosject is to play catchup with Firefox on UI and security (but obviously not on web standards?)… But if this is what stops you: put a few fulltime MS-devlopers on that project (just to repeat myself) to fix security.
> and ActiveX support.
We *don’t* want ActiveX.
We *don’t* want ActiveX.
We *don’t* want ActiveX.
> security and ActiveX support
You can’t have both.
I thought of a couple more improvements for IE 7. It would be nice if it supported the application/xhtml+xml and text/xml document types. I like how Mozilla will show me the offending line of code when an error occurs in the xhtml file when served as either of those 2 types. Is this something that can make it to IE 7?
> -support for "id=" bookmark references; i can’t make pages XHTML 1.1 compliant because of this
You can’t make XHTML 1.1 pages that work with Internet Explorer at all. XHTML 1.1 shouldn’t be served as text/html but Internet Explorer doesn’t understand application/xhtml+xml
> -proper support for the xhtml indicator tag <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> at the start of the page; IE reverts to a specialized mode when this is on page and this can change how the page is displayed
Internet Explorer uses quirks mode *because your page is broken*.
If you are serving XHTML as text/html, as per spec., it should be XHTML 1.0 and follow the guidelines in Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification.
Go back to HTML. XHTML obviously isn’t getting you anything (you are serving it as text/html, which means it’s just being treated like HTML anyway), and it’s causing you compatibility problems.
> BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL! BOX MODEL!
They fixed the box model years ago.
> If a breaking change makes a mission critical application nonfunctional, who is going to pay for the rewrite.
The people who broke it – the people who wrote the mission critical application with no regard for the W3C specifications or other browsers. Relying on Internet Explorer’s quirks in a mission-critical application is an obvious business risk, if you make no attempt to mitigate it, then you deserve everything you get.
> -User C is the most interesting of them all. They use Mozilla Suite or Opera. These people are more often than not browser envangalists, or web developers, though they are a minority.
Er, no. You seriously think that most Mozilla or Opera users are developers? You are way off base.
> __With every subsequent major release of IE, we have expanded and improved our implementation of … HTML.__
IE/Win 4.0 added partial support for HTML 4.0, but I’ve seen little progress in subsquent versions.
5.0: <bdo>
5.5: dir=…, ‎/‏
6.0: partial <optgroup> support
These small improvements are welcome, but don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.
It’s curious that there is still no support for <abbr>.
It’s absence is IE/Win 4.0 is understandable — <abbr> was a late addition to HTML 4.0, and
Internet Explorer 4.0 was released on 3 October 1997, two months before the final HTML 4.0 standard was published.
Yet several years and at least three major releases later, Internet Explorer 6.0 still completely ignores <abbr>, even though it’d be a trivial change to handle <abbr> as if synonymous with <acronym>.
It leads me to doubt that full HTML 4.0 support has been a priority since the standard was released.
Just posted my Microsoft Internet Explorer Suggestions at
Adam
Andrew hit the nail on the head with his comment above. I wholeheartedly echo his sentiments and couldn’t have put them any better than he did.
I’m in awe of Dean Edwards’ IE7, considered by many to be the CSS rosetta stone for Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), which also still happens to be the most widely used web browser on the planet. For the long-frustrated…
Chris, I want to thank you for having the guts to do this. As you know, Microsoft has got a *lot* of flack, not least in connection with this browser. And so the tone of some of the posts above is certainly unfortunate, but understandable to a degree.
I wish to comment made by someone above, suggesting that developers are not really customers; users are. In the most direct sense, there is truth to that. And yet, not altogether. Because what users see is what developers have done. And therefore, what developers do directly affects the user – whether that be by way of less adequate sites, or by way of bloated code, or whatever. Although Joe User may not realize the ins and outs of this, if Microsoft really cares about their users, they need to acknowledge that listening to developers is a key part of genuinely caring for their customers. I hope that your post, Chris, is a genuine indication of such an acknowledgement.
I understand that MS is a business. And as a business, MS is bound to make money. I don’t have a problem with that. But making money should not be pitted against running a business with integrity.
Regarding recommendations, I don’t have anything novel to add here. It seems clear to me what priorities there should be:
1. Security. It doesn’t directly affect me as a developer, but it’s a no-brainer that this has to top the list.
2. All positioning/structural issues need to be brought up to standards, whether they are HTML matters or CSS.
3. Presentation improvements, both in terms of being more CSS compliant and supporting PNGs. Full CSS 2.1 compliance, of course, would be what I really hope for. Adopting the appropriate CSS3 modules would be gravy. (Perhaps a bone to throw to everyone for having to wait such a long time for such needed improvements?)
I’m not a programmer, so I won’t comment on the improvements that need to be made in such areas; I’m confident you are much more aware of the issues than I am.
Thanks for listening.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for taking the time out to comment.
I code websites everyday for various clients and whilst I enjoy that process tremendously, I find the problems that Internet Explorer causes tremendously frustrating.
Xhtml/css is not that difficult once you have grasped the fundamental principles. It is relatively easy to code a page, fire it up in Safari or Firefox or Opera and in most cases it works exactly as it should. And then I have that dreadful moment when I open the site in IE and I have lost count of the times I have cursed Microsoft for putting a product out that doesn’t work properly.
I don’t know enough about the technical side of building a browser to make a constructive comment so I won’t. But I will make an analogy. Years ago they invented the wheel and it was wonderful and it enable people to do all sorts of things they never could before. People wondered how they could improve it but it was one of those ideas that was difficult to beat. But then somebody put rubber tyres on the wheels and wow, how much better could it be? So the world loved the idea and none of us are going back to rickety wooden wheels.
And this is where the analogy kicks in. Browsers are wonderful devices and in their simplest form do wonderful things reasonably well. Xhtml/css are rubber tyres and they make things smoother, better and the user experience is immeasurably better. At the moment, IE is a wooden wheel and is holding us all up. Please put rubber tyres on and let’s all make the medium the best that it can be.
1/. I hope IE7 will have an individual hack so that we can seperate features for it when css coding, like this one for IE5 Mac version
/**//*/
@import "ie5mac.css";
/**/
I really appreciate being able to use these to get around any issues that will arise.
2/. Dean Edwards is very clever and his approach will help us many miles down the road, but using his code is not the be and end all. Adding a large javascript download to a site first time you arrive is not cool if you have dialup connection. I have great respect for Dean and while I do have broadband most do not.
<a href="">I‘ve been trashed for using a fake name</a>. I am not the issue. The issues are the issues. My issue is practicality, achievability (remember IE7 will have a short developement time, the team had to be brought back together in a hurry from other projects).
Next hope will be a rewrite of the rendering engine for IE8. This would need to be started very soon. Good luck.
Chris Wilson wrote:
>>we are not investigating hosting the Gecko engine inside IE. There are also a number of considerable negatives from our perspective, particularly in compatibility with current content, security and ActiveX support.
Chris, that’s a joke. Security in IE??? Security and ActiveX in the same sentence? I can’t even trust using xmlhttprequest with IE anymore because it requires ActiveX which is often turned off for security reasons. In Gecko/Safari/Opera it is done safely via Javascript. (And Gecko even has an extension for ActiveX if you really wanted it.)
Obviously MS won’t use gecko, but it’s not because it’s not vastly superior overall, because it clearly is. MS DOESN’T WANT GENERAL STANDARDS ACROSS THE BOARD BECAUSE NOT TO THEIR ADVANTAGE. They want some standards, but then variations and deviations that tie people to the behemoth.
This blog and request for info you already very well know since before IE6 is a marketing charade, not "brave" or "admirable" or anything else. IE7 is already announced and will be a couple minor additions only, wrapped up in a new paintjob as though shiny new, just like IE6 was. The motor is shot.
Chris you don’t seem to get it: you can’t use the same tactics as with IE6 because IE is well-known as a complete joke now compared to the competition, and sinking fast. MS always does everything it can to get developers onside for its technologies because so important, yet developers hate IE now. Think about it. And just wait until Google and AOL fully turn against IE…
Somehow, I lost my faith now after reading some of the arguments in the comments, this is my second post. Microsoft doesn’t care about standards one bit, as it is they who are trying to be the standard. Folks, forget about fixed background images for inline html elements, forget about buttons that will be antialiased with any type of background *anywhere* on the page (png alpha), forget about min-height and max-width that will enable you to prepare pages that will scale up and down without breaking, forget about cascading menus without javascript. Some on this page event went far as to say that he doesn’t care about PNG alpha as this would create "dreadful interfaces and harsh user experiences". I find it amusing to see such opinions lacking common sense.
Considering that
1) A great amount of functionality was lost because of bad Javascript.
2) MS did nothing to block this (until Firefox came with a 1 version).
3) Javascript is not a MS product.
Is there a relation? Was there an intention to destroy Javascript in favor of the .net alternatives?
At least at this moment we can recomend a client to download an alternative browser that works fine.
I do not believe any more in MS visions, plans, etc. (and I invite you). Just the facts.
Very hope to fix the iframe memory leaks ,it’s an seriously bug in browser applications!
Besides all the accusations and conjecture about IE vs. the World and Microsoft as the devil, the main issue here is that anyone interested in standards and XHTML/CSS webdesign has read article after article that says, "Hey, look at this awesome feature that works in every browser except IE for Windows."
It is absolutely heart breaking when you develop a site using a developer friendly browser like firefox and it looks great, pixel perfect in fact only to test it out in IE and see bug after bug. There are "3 pixel" bugs for a dozen situations. Truth be told, the only way to effectively develop a standards compliant website is to make it work in Firefox and then go to and steal half a dozen hacks (sometimes more) from their site to make it work in IE.
IE has terribly buggy support for anything with a float. It doesn’t respect box sizes and is happy to bloat a box if the inside content is too big.
I would strongly advise the IE team do a Google search (or a new/improved MSN search) for "ie css bug" and add everyhting they find to their bug tracker. Just fixing the bugs would be a godsend. Then adding the minimal amount of CSS to keep IE competitive with FireFox will really be amazing.
Perhaps the greatest boon would be to release the PNG support as a patch for IE 5.x and 6.
SIDE NOTE: I develop exclusively in FireFox and then add hacks to make it work in IE. THis is entirely because of two things. 1) tabs and 2) the Web Developer Toolbar
what about DOM2, CSS3, rendering problems and lots of bugs
I’ve been very loyal to IE. I used to stick up for it in IE bashing topics. IE loads phpmyadmin a hell of a lot faster than firefox and security issues are only objective…
Then, the deeper and deeper I got into web development, the more I started to hate IE.
Seriously, full CSS support, .png partial transparency support, and dom compliancy will win many back.
"So what are you going to do? Adopt standards, or continue apologising for what are clearly economically-oriented decisions of the past?
The web is bigger than Microsoft.
Fall in or fall out."
DOM2 is good, but please don’t implement CSS3. CSS3 is not a recommendation. It may change in the future, making IE non-standard for another five years.
Thanks Chris. It’s very positive that IE 7 is not just going to be a security fix.
As a web application developer and as you have noted we have seen IE go from cutting edge, to behind the ball game, to what appeared to be abondonment. Welcome back, and best luck in your future development efforts.
I’ve always used IE right since the very start. I remember when that was the only webrowser I even knew about.
WTF? IE just created a wierd toolbar at the bottom.
Anyways, yes I always used IE, since I only downloaded files and went around websites.
That is until I meet Firefox. There I finally saw the differences of IE and Firefox. Firefox loaded so much better, loaded faster, and didn’t do things on it’s own like IE. Everytime I use IE I have a new toolbar. Spam, Pop-Ups and even wierd changes to IE6.0 happen so frequently it’s become quite sad.
Recently I’ve started making my own website and I tested it with Firefox. I made a big change to make the layout fit all screen resolutions and it worked great in Firefox neatly putting equal space between the tables and doing exactly what I wanted. People kept complaining that my site looks like crap in IE, I didn’t believe them. I looked at it and stared in awe. The tables actually had gotten smaller, and I have this huge space between my tables. The text looks fuzzy while in Firefox it does not. Also 80% of IE users can’t open my page. All I use is HTML and a bit of CSS. Heck, every time I load my page on IE, I get like 2 errors and a critical warning and nothing is hapepning.
IE6.0 – A Webmaster’s Nightmare
"So what are you going to do? Adopt standards, or continue apologising for what are clearly economically-oriented decisions of the past?
The web is bigger than Microsoft.
Fall in or fall out."
>Finally, I want you all to know that specific requests and descriptions of problems in the field
>help us tremendously in prioritizing what we need to do.
1. Fix the bugs in current standards implementation.
2. ABBR element in HTML 4.
3. background-attachment: fixed in CSS1.
4. CSS 2.1.
5. PNG alpha transparency without DirectX filters.
6. XHTML 1.0/1.1 with application/xhtml+xml MIME type.
7. JPEG 2000, MNG (animated PNG), SVG graphics formats.
8. W3C DOM Level 2.
>>I can’t even trust using xmlhttprequest with IE anymore because it requires ActiveX which is often turned off for security reasons.
To clarify, I didn’t mean xmlhttprequest is unsafe. What I meant was, as a developer, I can’t rely on xmlhttprequest being available because ActiveX is increasingly turned off for security reasons – thus poor security around ActiveX is ruining what should be a normal modern browser feature.
PNG support should be a priority. This would GREATLY increase the flexibility and ease of designing websites today, greatly empowering designers to create better designs and better websites. The end result would be a huge success for internet users everywhere.
Tables seem to wish to inherit odd properties from each other, I believe this puesdo code is what I’m talking about:
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0"… etc>
<tr>
<td align="center">
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0"… etc>
<tr>
<td>something just to offset the center of the table</td>
<td>xxx</td>
</tr></table></td></tr></table>
xxx will be centered within it’s own *cell*, inheriting it from the td above it. Nothing major I suppose, probably wouldn’t be even necessary if IE’s css was compliant… so just make sure the css is compliant! CSS is too godly to screw around with. If you want to add different code and behaviors (filter: glow), do it in seperator selectors and such. I will not make three versions of the same code, one for compliant browsers, one for ie6 and one for ie7.
If you decide to include tabbed browsing please add an option to disable it. I hate tabbed browsing.
XHTML MIME content-type.
CSS2.1 including min-width/max-width/min-height/max-height, HTML 4.x ABBR tag, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1.
Full HTTP 1.1.
XForms, XSLT, XPath, XQuery.
PNG alpha.
JNG/MNG graphics formats.
Hire Mr. Jeffery Zeldman & Eric Meyer for all standard based, CSS and Rendering issues. Believe me, they can change IE-7 and Microsoft’s image.
….and yes, don’t forget Text Zooming option.
.left{
width: 150px;
float: left;
background-color: red;
}
.right{
width: 100%-200px;
min-width: 500px;
background-color: yellow;
}
<div class="left">xyz</div>
<div class="right">xyz</div>
CSS. Yes, you need to support it. CCS1 – CSS2 – perhaps a smattering of 3 (although not if it means guessing and being broken – read box-model).
You could also include:
*Tabbed browsing (all the major cutting edge browsers have it. It does work, it is a good idea)
* Proper support for RSS and its ilk.
* Built in search bar that offers options other than MSN
* Proper pop-up blocker.
* Full support for DOM and ECMAscript
* PNG support
* Skinning
Just a few (unoriginal but extraordinarily useful) ideas
Everyone seems to said everything already, but just to emphasize the ones that should be easy for you guys to implement (there is no excuse to not have it by the version 7):
(*) PNG Alpha Transparency
(*) JPEG2000
Hi Chris,
One comment and one question :
(1) you did not mention what you did BEFORE IE 2.0 and where…
(2) what about Tasman on Windows ?
Best,
</Daniel>
You know what you need to do. Just do it. All this talk is just crap.
With the resources of MS it shouldn’t be that hard.
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico">
or
<link rel="icon "type="image/png" href="/favicon.png">
what should I use?
Chris writes…
."
A) I think using Gecko as the basis for IE 7 would be THE BEST thing you could do for the web, developers and end users.
B) I realize that you will never do it.
C) Let’s be honest though – the reason is pride and control, not compatibility or security.
I don’t ever see IE being able to catch Firefox or Opera in terms of adherance to standards. I don’t believe Microsoft will invest the money needed to rewrite it from scratch, which is what it will take.
If you ever wanted to turn the tide of anti-Microsoft sentiment in the IT world, shaking hands with the Mozilla folks and saying "We’re behind you" would be the best thing you could do. Why keep the fight going?
To explain:
Microsoft is most definitely planning to create their own set of standards for IE7. They will then rely on the web development community to adopt these standards.
If you adopt the standards Microsoft imposes, or allow your clients to bully you into adopting those standards, then you only have yourself to blame.
Then again, most of the IT world is on Microsoft’s payroll – in one way or another.
So welcome to IE7. Let the umpteenth round of hacks being
Another vote for JPEG2000!
Sure you can get plugins to enable compatibility, but the format will not gain critical mass without IE support. Standard JPEG’s quality is simply apalling compared to JPEG2000.
I recently worked on a project in which I was able to remove IE from windows XP and Windows 2000. I think there are some major flaws in the way Microsoft implemented IE as a "part" of the os, which greatly degaded the security of the OS itself, as well as the user’s privacy.
Some observations:
1. CSS. While I am not an "expert" web designer, I have found many ways to write "beautiful" web pages without using style-sheets. With high-speed internet connections being more common, I have built much of my pages out of scaleable graphics and good old tables. The problem I find is that IE does not decode even the simplest HTML functions consistently. Alignment and fonts are just not consistent. What will work fine on Mozilla and Opera will always look different in IE. Particurlarily vertical spacing.
2. I see that i-frames now work on something other than IE. Opera for sure, I have not tried it with Mozilla. This was the biggest drawback for the non-ie browser crowd.
3. Internet Explorer needs to get rid of the whole cache system as it is implemented from IE4 and up. The IE cache system has caused momentary freezups on every windows PC I have used. It took me a long time to figure this out. Whether or not you are on the internet, the minute you type something in an address bar, it is writing to the index.dat et all. It runs all the time! This whole background task seems to take priority over all processes running on the computer. When the dat file gets large, the computer freezes up while it is searching the file. This is a big waste of CPU and drive access time, and causes audio and video media to skip and freeze every so many seconds.
A better way to set up cache (which is an obsolete system designed for low bandwidth and dial up!) is to use ram – allocate, say 20 meg, on browser load. This will never get too large, because it gets erased every time the computer shuts down or the browser is closed. Opera has this option somewhat, and it SERIOUSLY speeds up the browser! Spyware such as ISTBAR has found a way to hide its installer in the temporary internet files folder. And, unless you know the trick to accessing it, you can’t erase the installer, which is set to run every time you boot!
4. IE Security.
A. Internet Explorer NEEDS to be separate from the computer browser. The OS itself uses HTML-based coding for some of the newer-style windows and graphics. This should have a separate set of dlls that specifically and only work for the computer portion, but can never talk to winsock or the internet. VB based programs that use html windows (like yahoo messenger)should be supported by the programs themself – previous versions could simply have a substitute dll(s) placed in the program’s directory. I did this on my IE less computer, and it works fine.
5. IE needs to stop or eliminate those "IE" specific features. I don’t mean buttons and menus, but some of the "only windows works with this" features. For instance, Napster music service requires IE 6 and Windows Media Player to use their service. What does that do for the MAC users, as well as Linux? The whole "Digital Rights Management" system that seems to be integrated into IE is overcomplex and not all that secure. Why not let napster make their own software (or even hire microsoft) client that does this? Exactly what does DRM have to do with the web browser or the operating system? To the consumer, it looks like macrosoft is trying to lock the user out of parts of their own computer. This also creates a great hole for viruses to prevent the user from getting rid of as well. Hiding files and encryption keys on one’s pc is just asking for hackers.
6. Active X. A nice idea at first, but a little scary, too. If the user is too stupid to download a file to a location, asses it, and then open it, why would one trust them to just let something auto-install right off the web?
7. Outlook Express, Outlook. These need also to use separate html interpreters. E-mail is basically text and files. The problem is that instead of sending text and files, outlook is sending web pages, which are essentially live. Yes, your file does originate from the mail server, but once you open the window, any scripts written now have full and complete access to the internet…and your cache…and your address book…and any other of those background files. So, someone could send you an e-mail, you would look at it, and it would now immediately connect to a web page, which would log your IP address and the time you connected, which would confirm the e-mail reciever’s existance. With this information, they now could launch an attack on your computer, as well as execute another script that would send them all the data in your cache-files and address book. (maybe an active x program?) Voila, you’ve got spam! Voila, they now know where to look for your personal documents, since their locations are stored in the cache files. Voila, they now know around what time of day your computer is turned on. You’ve been hacked, and your invention or corporate secrets have been stolen.
The right way? Connect to the e-mail server, download the html file. Store it in a folder in the e-mail program’s directory, under the ..inbox/username/ directory, as a plain old .html file. (this way, users could backup their e-mail) Now, using a stand-alone, non-connected html decoder (heck, they could use mozilla!) open the file. Because the html decoder is NOT integrated into IE, nothing ever gets sent out to the internet. Ever. Should you click on the link that says "please confirm your account information", the e-mail program would shell launch the default web browser, which would be forced to show you what page you were actually going to. The html program would not allow any complex scripts – none of these are needed in e-mail. That is not what e-mail was made for.
So. My IE fixes would be:
1. Standardized fonts and spacing that has been tested to be identical to mozilla
2. Memory Cache
3. Separate, independent browsers with all dlls vxd’s, etc located in their own folder. Internet Explorer would be a separate program.
4. Elimination of Active X
5. Rights management software should be the responsibility of the drm provider, not the OS manufacturer. Companies like napster would instead use a VB type program to connect to their servers and download encrypted files. This would not require files all over one’s pc.
6. Outlook needs to be re-written with a simple file storage system, its own independent html reader, and not connected live to the internet, unless opened by an independent web browser.
Neil Schubert
I have seen comments from MS on the PNG transparency issue some time ago, the problem relates to various optimisations they do with images IIRC. As a developer myself, I know that changing from highly optimised code which doesnt natively support a particular feature, would basically require a re-write. Certainly not a ‘couple line’ fix as suggested above. I also realise that by not supporting alpha transparency, there a lot of ‘shortcuts’ you can take to have more efficient code, which Im hoping IE takes, if it doesnt support such a feature.
Using gecko or some other rendering component would also require more work than fixing IE to render equivalently. Based on the DOM and use of COM and scripting throughout IE, I cannot imagine its something that can just have a drop in replacement while still retaining all the functionality IE has.
What has ‘tabs’ got to do with the topic of this blog "IE and Standards"?
I am so sick and tired of hearing people bitching about tabbed browsing. Shut up already! There are loads of add-ons that provide tabbed browsing for IE (Maxthon, NetCaptor, AvantBrowser etc.) go use one of those or switch to Firefox.
Microsoft should concern itself with rendering engine and security issues (as these can never be fixed by an add-on) rather than farting about with superficial copycat UI changes that can already be achieved by several other means.
>As a developer myself, I know that changing from highly optimised code which doesnt natively support a particular feature, would basically require a re-write.
There is no need to re-write PNG code. Windows XP already has GDIPLUS.DLL that can display PNGs with alpha transparency. GDIPLUS.DLL is used by some Windows components (for example Scanner and Camera Wizard, Image/Fax Viewer).
If IE7 is going to be compatibile only with XP SP2 and newer, it can be changed to use GDIPLUS.DLL instead of PNGFILT.DLL.
It doesn’t look like anyone has posted this yet, but there is a laundry list of IE bugs listed over at
While re-reading through the latest comments, I saw one by Bill Hall and one that is definitely important though not mentioned often.
While developing anything on the Web, we have to test it in everything under the sun. This means testing on older browsers. A trend for most software is to completely obliterate existing versions with new ones and not allowing the older ones to be installed side-by-side with them. This is why it is incredibly important that you allow us to either keep IE6 on our system and install IE7 side-by-side OR overwrite it and allow us to reinstall IE6 if we want.
I can understand how the average user would get confused if they were offered a choice of having two of the same thing on their system so it would probably be better to implement the latter solution.
We shouldn’t have to have to keep an entire other computer next to us just to test something on an older browser. Currently, there are ways to run IE 5/5.5/6 simultaneously thanks to the good folks at Evolt (). If you don’t allow us the option of reinstalling IE6, they will probably figure something out eventually. Why not save everyone the trouble and allow us from the start? Developers world wide will be greatful.
If it isn’t too much trouble, I wouldn’t mind hearing MS’s reaction to this request. I know MS has been pretty much silent on virtually everything dealing with IE7 but a few specific reactions would be nice.
I think one only needs to compare this article to one recently made on a Safari developer’s blog, at . I think we’d all be a little more lenient regarding IE’s development if we found posts like Hyatt’s here at IE’s blog… substantive, genuine evidence of trying to achieve standards compliance, with technical explanations and real responses to community concerns (such as his post here regarding Apple’s HTML extensions).
Just 3 simple XHTML-related things:
- application/xhtml+xml MIME type support
- recognizing *.xhtml files by default
- accepting XML declaration without switching to quirks mode
And don’t forget abbr, q and object elements…
I would very much like to see :hover working on every elements, not just anchors. I would also like the !important to really be important, not be let out.
Perhaps the min-height-property could have been arranged together with fixed positioning, png 24 alpha channel, real support for CSS 2 and a way to define layout on buttons, textareas, inputs and more with CSS.
When you say that web developers are your customers then you should focus only on CSS support and forget the security issues. Because no developer uses IE for surfing and therefore has no security problems
CSS 3 is best
Have a look at this useful, but awful, CSS hack over at Venkatna’s blog:
There’s a big reason to start implementing CSS3 as soon as you’ve finished CSS2
Hopefully the CSS3 standard will have evolved into a final recommendation by then.
Hi Chris,
I want to see IE7 to be standards-compliant so web programmers, like myself, would find it easier to conform to as I have to deal with competing but standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Safari.
Secondly, I would like IE7 to have:
Firefox is a good example.
1. tabbed browsing
2. whatever that makes IE "the browser experience" platform that sets apart from other browsers.
3. extensible/customizable (e.g. add-ons are optional) so that the browser can be as minimal as you want or as bloated as you want!
4. Bookmarks that I can synchronise it for home and work. Preferably, we have something like to do the synchronising for us.
Chris,
Firstly, thanks for taking the time to interact with your consumers, it is refreshing to think that you guys want/value our input. For that one guy who said, "let’s start a blog and get the web developers’ opinions", THANKYOU.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but IE has been annoying me for a while now. I work in a small development environment where I code in php, asp (if required) (x)html, javascript etc. I don’t have the time to learn new and exciting ways to fix something that souldn’t be broken. If a page is coded to W3C standards, it should work. I just find it annoying that I have to create one css for IE, and one for the rest.
You guys obviously have a lot on your hands and I don’t envy you in the slightest. There are a few viewpoints I can imagine for the future if IE from a CSS angle;
- Include FULL support for CSS 2
or
- Include PARTIAL support for CSS 2 (see)
The first option could potentially ‘break’ some sites that use css filters/javascript detection for IE. The second option would be more of a quick fix, and shouldn’t involve any ill effects.
Personally, I’d love to see the full specification of CSS in IE7, if I have to change a few pages here and there, so be it. You can’t make an omlette without… well, you know the rest.
I think my main point here is; there are a few particular problems with Internet Explorer’s rendering that require hacking the css to suit (for example:). If these were fixed, everything else would be a bonus.
Lastly, I know that IE is the most popular browser, and I don’t have a problem with that. A lot of people the world over trust MicroSoft Internet Explorer, but that trust has been slipping recently. If it could only come into line with the current web standards, that trust could be regained with a large number of ‘switchers’. I say this only because I used IE for years, until FireFox came along with the prospect of real css support and the "Developer Toolbar" (which is invaluable).
What John Serris said ^
What Steve Smith said ^
If you’re still unsure of the problems IE causes web devs, cann the guys who maintain
Regards;
Poncho
This isn’t standards, but I’m not aware of where else this kind of open-door discussion is going on….
PLEASE make the new SP2 alert thing at the top of the screen more judicious in what it flags!! I can’t do so much as a rollover, js form sumbit and validation, calculator applet, or transparency filter without that thing popping up and scaring my audience!!
Please tell me this is a temporary stopgap and you are going to fix the security holes it is meant to protect, or at least come up with a smarter way to block malicious activity. The average user has no idea how to determine whether it is safe to run "might also harm your computer." Either they will always leave it blocked, or always allow it. The former will force developers to strip out interactivity and client-side programming, making the browser essentially worthless as a development platform and shortchanging our clients and users, and the latter will make the blocking useless.
I mean, REALLY!
Woudn’t it be nice if windows came with firefox ?
IE would fade out rapidly and there wont be any more issues about it…
I’m speaking from the context of applications development. "audience" was probably not the best term to use.
I occasionally drop in to the weblog of Safari developer Dave Hyatt, just to see what is being implemented for the next version of said browser.
I suggest this as a good read for the IE development team.
Thankyou, and good day.
Oh, and try this as well.
Chris, please don’t bother improving IE. It’s just fine the way it is. No complaints. All anybody really wants is a few more cool proprietary features and a new look.
As I said in the IE7 blog, I use Firefox. The reason that I use this browser is:
1) It is small under 7MB. It is self-contained and can be run from it’s install dir without needing to add stuff to the Windows dir. This means that I can use it without needing the Admin passwd in college.
2) It is very secure, it can be configured to drop ALL cookies and browsing history when you close the program. This makes it harder for sites to track you and you are automaticaly logged off sites like music downloads and forums because the session cookies are not kept.
3) It has full standards support for nearly all W3C standards, my website was built to support the same standards and dosn’t view correctly with IE.
4) It is not tied to any proprietary system like ActiveX that can be exploited by websites and viruses.
IMHO for IE to become a faster and reliable browser that will make everyone happy, it has to be redesigned from the ground up. I would suggest that the currant code be dropped (stop using that SpyGlass code!).
Utilise the Gecko rendering engine and add a module to parse the propriatary code that Microsoft uses as well as modules for ActiveX and other Microsoft technologies. Add a means of removing or disabling the modules and easily customising the browser for use by ISP’s and there you will have it. A small efficient, standards complient browser. Of course you could always just release an XPI for Firefox that adds the Microsoft Technology support to the firefox browser and use the firefox software in the next windows release.
I will look forward to what the IE team manages to come up with, no doubt you will need to validate your copy of windows before you can download the beta!
IE very stupid browser.
WHY?
- 70 mb. very big.
- not support W3.org standarts.
- half support PNG (transparency? )
- not OPEN SOURCE. I want which code inside?
Just a question: who is need IE?
The time of this browser will going down and the period is run off with users, who has understood what standards are.
Forgot to say, I think it should be good a better involvment of Microsoft developers on the W3C works, collaborating in doing standard and implement them on the software would be very useful for all web developers
Another vote for full PNG support. Please. Pretty please.
Also would like to see the most valiant effort you can manage at supporting CSS2. Please.
And thanks for asking, btw.
Great read.
Can’t wait for more CSS2 standards compliance. One note: For the sake of testing… can you NOT force IE6 off the machine in order to set up IE7? We designers still need to test on older browsers. I’d love to be able to have side by side versions of all the IE releases.
Just my 2 cents:
A robust set of standard support should include:
CSS 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 and CSS3
XHTML 1.0, 1.1 and preliminary 2.0
MathML 2.0
SMIL 2.1
PNG, PNG Second Edition, JPEG2000, SVG 1.1
JavaScript 2.0
P3P 1.1
HTTP 1.1
XForms
Thanks to IE developers for reading my post.
Robert, I accidentally failed to unmoderate your post along with about 10 others yesterday. They show up now just fine.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
AmyC: If you’re developing stuff that is intended to run in the Local Machine Zone, you really ought to use a .hta, rather than a .htm, as it won’t be affected by SP2’s lockdown.
Oddly enough, my comments posted from Safari show up fine. When I tried posting a couple comments to this blog from FireFox yesterday, my comments got filtered.
Can you say corporate censorship?
Ben, maybe you should look up the word "proprietary" before you post idiotic things. Proprietary and standards are two different things.
I am a web designer. My own protest against IE’s lack of CSS 2/XHTML/DOM support is that when I can get away with it, I code in CSS 2/XHTML/DOM and if it breaks in IE, then IE be damned. I put a little blurb on the site noting that if things look strange then the user should upgrade to firefox.
Obviously some corporate customers aren’t cool with this (For them I make sure that things don’t break in IE, but look better in standards compliant browsers), but a surprising number say this is ok. They like Firefox because it’s so much more secure.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Native SVG support and JPEG2000 support would be nice, too. Since SVG can be mixed with HTML elements in an XHTML document, this is a natural feature to implement natively. (Gotta love XML namespaces!) As for JPEG2000 — well, everyone else who’s asked for it has explained the benefits, so I shouldn’t have to. Microsoft probably has a license for any proprietary bits in JPEG2000, so it’s not as though they can’t use this technology.
Well, I can see that my comments made yesterday didn’t get posted. So I covered my requests in my blog. I wonder if my comments got censored because of which browser I was using?
Anyway, here were the things I requested,.
Amy, read this:
Perhaps that will solve your presumed problem?
I suppose the main things I would like to see are proper PNG support, and better support for the interactive script standards.
In response to
I dont really go for theming individual apps – although I suppose it can be nice to (and IE can be themed – a few notable ISPs and workplaces do it), I prefer to specify look and feel themes over a whole GUI.
Tabbed browsing is a must, it is probably one of the features of FireFox I use most.
Anyway – a more secure, standards compliant browser with tabs on Windows really could do MS some favours – it would mean that I probably wouldnt install FireFox(or previously Mozilla) on every machine I have to use.
That’s not Ben as in Ben Goodger posting is it?
If you didn’t know, the Acid2 test has silently gone live over at .
It seems to be a pretty advanced test
I’ve made some screenshots of how different browsers cope with it over at
’."
That may well turn out to be the case, but there are a few things which could make the aftermath of such a decision slightly less long-lived than the current technology grid-lock has been:
1) As Peter Reaper says, you can do some pretty cool things just using CSS2 and PNG. Heck, you can do some pretty cool things using only CSS 1, if correctly implemented:
(Use FF/Opera to check that one out…)
2) Many, many Internet users would not be able to use a webpage specifically coded with Avalonities: Linux users, Mac users and many Windows users (at least those on 2K, 95 & 98, Me & NT).
I’m glad I finally caught your attention… I knew I had to do something drastic. I guess I overstepped some boundaries there and I apologize. I just wanted to see if you guys were still listening to us… A follow up to this article would be nice… We are just so frustrated by having us tell you guys the same things over and over again without any response.
Leaving aside the comments made by committed Microsoft junkies (surprisingly few) there seems to be a theme running here: get IE to comply with standards at least as well as Firefox does and then concentrate on the user interface. It seems to be what the other browser producers are concentrating on. Look at the difference between Safari and Omniweb. Same rendering engine so pages render the same way but very different browsing experience.
From a site author’s point of view (OK, it’s only a personal site) developing when I don’t personally have a copy of IE6 (no Windows at home) is a pain in the butt. I continually have to leave off checking that changes don’t break IE6 until I get to work which slows me up enormously. The solution is the same: implement the standards so that we don’t have to spend hours working around IE’s oddities.
Oh, and implement xmlHttpRequest without it relying on Active X.
You know, sometimes, the standards are wrong, and it is ok to break them.
For example, according to the W3C 4.01 HTML standard, nothing comes before the doc type stuff, not even comments.
That is the point of comments! To go anywhere and document stuff! Comments should be invisible anyways.
Just because its a standard doesn’t make it right.
I’m in awe of Dean Edwards’ IE7, considered by many to be the CSS rosetta stone for Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), which also still happens to be the most widely used web browser on the planet. For the long-frustrated…
Fiery, I consider that a personal insult.
Comments like that are why I turned on moderation. I thought I could turn it back off, but no, apparently not.
Please knock it off.
The most important things, right now, as I see it, are as follows:
1.) Implement XmlHttpRequest WITHOUT relying on Active X! Anyone doing major dev work right now knows that this is probably going to become the single most important piece of technology for web applications over the next several years. Unfortunately, reliance on ActiveX makes it impossible to use for anything user-facing without relying on all sorts of hacks and fallbacks. Knowing that all IE, Gecko, Opera, and Safari users who are using a relatively recent version of the browser can access your site is incredibly important.
2.) Make it so that when doing doctype sniffing, everything BEFORE the doctype declaration (e.g. xml prologs) can be safely ignored. Nothing is more frustrating than having your page jump into quirks mode just because of a comment.
3.) Treat application/xml+xhtml correctly. Goes without saying.
4.) Implement all of CSS1 and CSS2 correctly, per the standards. Implement any CSS3 proposals that are likely to not change in any meaningful way before they become official recommendations. Firefox already implements properties like opacity and many css 3 selectors that are pretty much guaranteed to not change before the final implementation. I know you worry about them changing at the last minute, and then having to deal with more variations to support – but I think some things can be safely accepted.
With regards to CSS 1 and CSS2, I really just don’t think that there’s any excuse for the lack of support for certain things – the :hover, :before, and :after pseudo-elements, as well as css 2 selectors specifically. I know the browser is already capable of many of these things – you’ve got stuff like expressions and filter built in which nearly mimick some of the standards behavior already.
5.) Make it so that the object tag does not trigger active x for mime types that don’t actually require active X – most importantly, text/whatever files (then we can FINALLY get rid of frames!) and images.
6.) Make the rendering engine a seperate, modular component that can be updated / replaced without having to upgrade the browser itself. The nice thing about IE7 rolling out now is that we can count on it becomming the most widely used browser within a matter of months, rather than years, because nobody is going to have to wait for an OS upgrade. This WILL allow, though, to upgrade other IE components (security, ui) for longhorn and future windows versions, but it will ensure that we can significantly reduce the wait period before we can safely implement new CSS features.
7.) Fix the numerous bugs related to floats and elements with position other than static – especially the need to have a height explicitly specified for things to properly expand and to not have weird margins.
Thanks, Kyle.
You did what IE-Devs don´t dare or are not allowed to.
To the Devs: What you are working on is more than just technology or business. And always remember: With great Power comes great Responsibility.
Thanks in advance for CSS Selectors; please keep the * html Bug."…
Short, simple, to the point, sir.
* Full standards conformity for the prevalent markup language specs in the wild today.
* Recognition of IE as an end-user web browser, and feature set to compete in that space. It’s a lovely presentation engine for corporate applications — the mythical "universal picture frame" — but let’s face it, even though the home browser arena isn’t a segment with much fiscal draw, it’s friction there that’s hurt IE historically. Others will probably address this point much better than I. I know it’s ridiculous. I know the home market should handle its own. But prejudice here is really hurting the product.
* For God’s sake, support PNG’s fully and correctly. It sounds small, but I’m amazed by the number of people who cite this in anti-IE rants.
I’ve been an IE advocate for a while, and both professionally and personally, am the guy who rolls his eyes, stands up, and delivers a can of pre-scripted spanking when I hear a supposedly intelligent developer bash the product. I truly believe these three points, if addressed well, will give IE the once-again-competitive edge it needs.
I want to love IE7. I really do. Give me the backing to champion your product, Chris, and I shall anew, gladly.
If you’d like to lead some kind of new standards effort, the thing that continually drives me crazy is rich text (HTML) editing. IE I think was one of the first to do it, and the generated HTML is absolutely horrible. Now Firefox does it, but it renders different HTML.
It’s a useful platform in content management, forums and blogs. I just wish it worked one way, based on some standard.
Well, Kyle pretty much sums it up, he states everything needed, and why most of it won’t be supported, and I completely agree with him.
:hover on all elements – totally #1;
fix wacky css bugs (floats, 3 pixel jog etc )
If you could the bugs with css floats (as mentioned above) and add ‘max-width’ support that would be groovy.
I must say that the IE dev blog is improving of late. This post is actually quite a good read.
Chris, most of what you say is true. Like most of the statement "fully supported CSS 1" is true.
However, that does not explain the last three years does it? OK, the security thing. But weren’t those patches to the Windows platform itself?
IE6 has stagnated since it’s release, let’s not forget how quickly IE6 followed IE5.5 and IE5.0. More annoying than this stagnation has been the silence from Redmond regarding future releases and the support of standards. Aging documentation, no support forum, undocumented features – IE6 has been a nightmare.
So what are you going to do? Adopt standards, or continue apologising for what are clearly economically-oriented decisions of the past?
The web is bigger than Microsoft.
Fall in or fall out.
The initial "minority" post[1] is what rubbed me the wrong way. It’s been refuted several times already, but perhaps I can bring this into a different light. It also goes back to Joel’s API War article[2] (irony: on Yahoo, MSN, and Google, a search for "microsoft api" turns this up first. I’m sure it will on other engines also, but I’m not going to bother).
We have the internet. By "internet" I mean "the majority of the traffic that crosses a router on tcp port 80".
We then have the content. Content is typically created by a developer, for the end-user.
We also have the browser. It’s what parses and displays the contents of the internet to the end user.
First, developer views.
-The trouble arises from the browser variations. (Note that this only applies to modern browsers, anything that’s not a recent mozilla incarnation, IE6, recent Opera version, or recent Safari version, you don’t apply here.) Now, developer A creates a site for internal company use, closed enviroment, etc. et all. Developer A can develop for any browser he wishes to, as it’s a closed, controlled enviroment. Likewise, developer A can pay exactly 0 attention to standards and it literally won’t matter to the end user, the one who really matters here.
-Developer B, however, let’s say that he is charged with creating a simple interface for a company, which allows clients of this company to come and download related files. Suddenly, he has to factor in a LOT more variables than a closed enviroment: if he supports IE only, what happens when a big client uses Safari? Thankfully, for something simple like downloading related files, there shouldn’t be too much havoc involved with making it work cross-browser (not mentioning cross-platform, yet). Likewise, clients using something other than IE are few in this siutation, so if he has to manually cater to a single client every so often, no big deal.
-Developer C, let’s say he helps to maintain a large web portal. The moment a production page hits, if it isn’t rendered essentially identically on every browser on every OS, he’s going to be having a large many issues, and soon.
Second, end user views.
-All that end users want, is a site that is functional in every aspect. However, we start to have some minor issues when end user A switches from IE to Firefox. They load up their favorite site, and are slapped with a blank page. "Firefox sucks!", they proclaim, and instantly switch back to IE. This user is by far the most common on the internet, and in a sense they are the most correct. Being a majority, if your site doesn’t work in their browser, they simply won’t visit your site.
-We now have User B, whom I’ll say uses Firefox. They’re a recent IE convert, in love with the speed and features, plus the better security than IE (I’m generalizing, I know that Firefox has bugs, critical security holes, but just how often they’re exploited and to what degree has yet to be seen). They love their non-IE browser to an undeniable degree.
-User C is the most interesting of them all. They use Mozilla Suite or Opera. These people are more often than not browser envangalists, or web developers, though they are a minority.
Third, browsers.
-We have legacy browsers, IE4, Netscape 4, and a few others. These are such a minority that developers don’t care for them, and to a point, rightly so.
-We then have IE6. IE is pure windows-only, and that’s not changing. It’s what end user A uses, and they see no reason at all to switch browsers. Not only does it work, but their favorite site doesn’t work in this other browser.
-Finally, we have Opera/Firefox/Mozilla Suite/Safari. Excluding our legacy browsers, they are the minority, but growing. Make a page in one using CSS2 and extensive UI tricks, despite being a wide range of browsers, they will generally render the same way straight across.
Fourth and finally, why IE will never ever fully support any web standard than their own.
As Joel wrote[1], "Microsoft lost the API war." This caused the back port of Avalon, among other things that were slated for Longhorn. However, he also said the following about DHTML:
-"There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client."
Which, I would say is indeed true. There’s a reason that Quicken is a rich-client application, and not a web application. In it’s current state, most browsers are simply not capable of giving them the same experience. However, with the advent of things such as Google Maps[3] and Gmail[4], suddenly the web got a LOT faster. Even for the 56k users. On top of that, a user with a 56k can now search through their e-mail several hundred times faster than any rich-client based e-mail application I’ve ever seen. With Google Maps, you can scroll state by state, or down to the street level if you so wish. The amazing part about this, however, is that you can scroll from one end of the US to the other, at a street level, without using several gigs of local hard drive space. It works on a 200MHz, and what’s more, it works pretty close to flawlessly. On top of all of that, it’ll work under linux, and essentially any OS that can run a modern browser. Pretty sweet if you ask me, and free to boot. However, this is where Microsoft and the IE team start to get worried. Their rich client interface is suddenly worth only so much, and the web interface is suddenly worth something as far as the end user rich client app is concerned. Suprise, it’s called innovation.
The IE team has been dead silent for the past several years, and only now do they speak of standards. The reason, once you think about it, is simple.
Let’s say that with IE7, we have complete support for everything under the sun, and to the letter that the standard states. If they do this, every developer everywhere goes up in cheer. Well, everyone but the IE6-HTML developers (so to speak), right? Ah, wrong, that’s why you’ve got quirks mode and reverse-compatability. In addition, they are Microsoft. They’ve got the money to revamp IE7 into the standards god of all gods, but they’re not going to. Why? Think of it like this: Microsoft and the IE Team say, "okay, agreed, we need some compatability here, and some general basis, so here, have full PNG support, enjoy." Sounds great, but it’s not all that it appears to be on the surface.
As Joel said, it’s too risky to their rich client end-model. Suddenly the web would be THE place to develop on. Accessability under any OS, under any browser, in any circumstances. Add in high-grade SSL, and to top if off, it’s (relatively) secure. But, the "wave of the future" IS the web. If Microsoft and the IE Team ignore this, they will be left in the dust as eventually more sites drop support for IE completly, due to lack of developer interest. "Developers developers developers developers!", right? They’re not going to miss out on that wave, there is a 0% chance of that happening.
So how are they going to pull this off? How are they going to satisfy developers, generate a good standard across all browsers, and still come out successful? Here’s a hint, they’re only going to pull two of the three.
This why they will never support CSS the same way that every other browser does. And, as long as they remain in the majority, they don’t need to. They’re making the most money, right, and as far as our customers are concerned, it’s good. They’ll always have "someone else" who demands support for X, but they’re not making money off of that.
They’re going to make a developer platform so great, so easy to use, while being secure, that provides rapid application development never before seen, and yet still have the ability to drop down to a really low level and optimize when it’s truly needed. They’re going to build something so great, that people will flock by the boatload. The catch? It’s windows IE only.
They’re giving us support for a lot of things, like PNG and most of CSS, but it’s kind of like giving the minorities a mini Hershey’s bar, while holding the four pound brick behind their back. They saw where this is going, and now they’re going to do something about it. For example, if they break Gmail, people will flock by the thousands upon thousands to Firefox.
The IE Team is 100% CRITICAL to Microsoft’s future. What they’re doing now, is providing existing developers a way to make killer apps (small piece of choclate), while holding the real treat for themselves.
"Developers developers developers!"
IE will never have proper CSS support, in effort to help their cause. The moment that IE7 supports it all, flawlessly, is the moment that anyone at all can use any other browser on any other OS, and without paying Microsoft a dime, get the job done. They’re just holding off for a bit, until they can release the killer platform that will invariably come.
In a nutshell: standards are the thing that could kill off quite a bit of Microsoft’s revenue.
Don’t count on them. You can place your money on the dollar, or pray that Firefox suddenly jumps to 40-60% marketshare. Thing is, Microsoft doesn’t need to innovate yet. They just need a Firefox killer, which is completly possible.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
Since you asked for requests…
It would be really nice if IE respected the Content-Type HTTP header. The default autodetection behavior is a security risk (XSS vector), pushing the burden for working around IE’s problems onto the developers of web applications that accept file and image uploads.
As for CSS2 support; the lack of position: fixed in particular has forced me to do a lot of workarounds over the last couple years. Working attribute selectors and the ‘content’ value for :before and :after pseudo-elements would be extremely helpful as well.
Backwards compatibility should not be taken lightly. If a breaking change makes a mission critical application nonfunctional, who is going to pay for the rewrite. How many dollars will the "web standards" folks contribute towards the salaries of the required programmers?
Dean, the IE platform is a part of Windows (see the earlier blog post relating to Netscape 8) and the IE team is a part of the Windows team.
So an update to the IE platform can be called an "IE patch" or a "Windows patch" and it really makes no difference – both would be correct.
There is a petition right here:
to get the IE team to include full standards support. (Although I think it should have been more clearly worded myself.)
Support CSS 1 isn’t something to brag about…I mean if you support CSS 1 and 2 and flawlessly support HTML 4.0 and all XHTML then you are at the MINIMUM level of being considered in the game. That’s just enough to qualify for the race…the race then starts with expandability and features. Security only gets you bonus points. IE ruled everything 5 years ago, but as paradigms shifts go…Firefox will win this time. I’m still a Microsoft loyalists though…but their stubborness in trying to stay alive in the browers and search engines is just bad business.
I’d like full support for print media. Being able to specify page orientation in a css stylesheet, being able to remove IE added page headers and footers from a stylesheet. This will allow me to get rid of most reporting tools, and use html for reporting.
A couple more items, relatively minor compared to my previous suggestions: How about JPEG2000 and SVG support?
With XHTML looming, people are going to develop (and indeed, already have developed) pages with HTML and SVG content freely mixed together — that’s the beauty of XML (and XML namespaces keep everything tidy).
I think JPEG2000 would be a nice feature to have, and since Microsoft probably already has a license for any proprietary bits in JPEG2000, you guys can probably fully support the standard.
Bruce,
The point is moot. From a developer’s point of view, IE6 has not changed one jot since it’s initial release. I would imagine that is why you have not altered it’s version number.
Since we are mentioning previous IE dev posts, how about his one:
btw, I appreciate your participation in this blog. Thanks.
After I submitted my first blog post… all the sudden there were 50 new posts. Anyway, I read those too. Asking us for our "wish list" doesn’t make sense. I have neither the time nor the inclination to jump through the "quirk" hoops so that my site designs display correctly in IE as they do in Firefox or any other WC3 compliant browsers. Get the list from the WC3 site and implement them like everybody else. That’s all I want.
We haven’t done a great job on that one [more posts on layout engine], have we? Sorry. Dave did that one on table layouts, but I think that’s it
IE6 for XPSP2 had quite a few dev oriented changes, but not web-dev layout, CSS, HTML, etc. oriented.
If you host IE platform components, there were quite a few changes on the security front.
I agree with all the things mentioned. Yes, full support for CSS 1/2 and x-html 1.1 would have been great!
As a web app developer, I can understand the delicate balance with which Microsoft must approach IE’s backwards compatibility. Because of Microsoft’s ownership of the browser market over the past half-decade, many apps on the web today rely heavily on IE to provide the functionality necessary to create the rich client interfaces to which our customers have become accustomed.
Personally, I don’t care to go back and rework every web app that relies on past versions of IE so that Microsoft can claim standards compliance. That said, most of the annoyances that plague my current web development efforts could be fixed without resulting in broken functionality.
If IE7 won’t provide full CSS2 support, Microsoft can at least ease the move from table-based layouts to css by 1.) including support for min and max width and height and 2.) fixing the box model.
At the very least, IE7 should also provide native PNG and transparency support that don’t require ActiveX controls.
> We haven’t done a great job on that one
Well Bruce, never mind I wasn’t exactly holding my breath…
What we web-developers really want to know is this:
What are you going to do about standards in the future? Particularly IE7 (by Microsoft) ;-).
We don’t need details. Just a hint of the direction you are headed in. If you can’t give us that, then this isn’t really a dev blog is it? Although I admit this dialogue is cool and novel…
The things I’d like to.
As a very small-time web developer in a very small company, I often don’t have time to become proficient in every detail and quirk of every browser I use. I’m sure you’d love for people to come up with a nice, itemised Bugzilla-style list of requested improvements, and I’d love to give you one – but I’m afraid there’s no particular set of features or fixes that would make make me happy.
The basic problem is that when I sit down with a copy of the W3C specs and a text editor, and try to make a page that’s reasonably semantic and CSS-enabled, that page usually works first go in Firefox and usually takes a lot of tweaking or outright re-writing to work on IE.
That said, here’s some choice items from our internal wiki page on IE flaws:
* Putting a floated element inside another floated element causes random chunks of the page to not be drawn. Floated elements are rather useful for making toolbars and tab-bars and the like.
* IE makes a dog’s breakfast of the <button> tag.
* <input> elements with "width: 100%" tend to have their right-hand ends cropped off.
* When Windows is in High Contrast mode, IE interprets "font-size: 100%" as something like "font-size: 110%". Implementing "font-size: inherit" would be much nicer.
TimG and Andy:
Thanks for the replies.
AndyC – Thanks for the .hta tip. I’m new to creating things intended for the local zone, and had not learned of that yet.
TimG – Thanks for your repsonse also. I’m not too terribly concerned about seeing it on my machine, though it is incredibly annoying and I’m glad to see it can be disabled. My biggest concern is that users will get spooked seeing that warning and question whether my code can be trusted (I’m freelance, not with an established agency).
The label tag (), is not currently supported by IE.
The thing that really irks me is that despite claiming not to, you are really just offering more excuses here. Yes, in 1996 IE3 had the first widely-available CSS1 implementation. So what? That was almost NINE years ago. And for almost the last FOUR of those nine years we have been stuck with IE6 and its quirks upon quirks. For all the debate for and against, by integrating the browser with Windows you had such an opportunity to make web development so much easier because of this quasi-standardization of the platform on which the majority of mainstream users surf the web. I really cannot imagine a way in which this opportunity could have been more wasted. Security improvements are all well and good, but making the browser’s primary function (i.e. [no pun intended!], rendering HTML) take a backseat to security is so frustrating. As a software developer, I know that you guys have been hard at work for the last four years, and I know what an enormous project IE must be, but there are SO MANY immediately recognizable problems with IE that cause so much frustration to such a huge number of web developers. And the fact is you haven’t despite all the work I know you’ve been doing, you haven’t really got anything to show for it, and you haven’t alleviated any of that frustration.
I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I think you guys have really screwed up. I don’t hold it against you, so you don’t need to apologize. All you really need to do, to make everyone happy, is deliver a really EXCELLENT product. These are features I would like to see and that would placate me:
CSS descendant, adjacent, and attribute selectors, and the :first-child pseudo class, :before and :after pseudo-elements, the content property, automatic counters and numbering, etc., and position:fixed.
Did you guys get we really want hover for all elements?
Please – in the same way I begged the asp.net/vs.net teams to emit valid XHTML code from the server controls (and they have stepped up to the challenge, best as I can at this point in the beta) – I am begging you to stop screwing around and just provide FULL CSS2 support. By full support, I mean that a page that validates should look pixel perfect on Firefox or IE7. We need you to support the baseline that this existing standard represents.
Obviously CSS is a major standard that needs better support, but HTML also needs to be more well supported. These elements aren’t supported correctly:
abbr – Should work essentially the same as acronym, but it has slightly different meaning.
button – Should default to a submit button rather than a push button.
object – See these test cases:
Object should also not be treated as an ActiveX object all the time. When IE is set to high security and an object element is present that loads an image, IE will give an ActiveX security warning. Set the security level to high to the internet zone and view any of those test cases to see this problem.
I’d also like to see you implement a conforming SGML parser and support the SHORTTAG features, but even Mozilla won’t be doing that properly. You should pass these tests at least as well as other browsers do.
C.
Here’s what I really really want:
-more sleep
-thus:fewer night hours spent learning countless i.e. hacks
-thus:one code – one effect, across all browsers
-thus: full CSS2
…
and in particular:
min-width, max-width, min-height, max-height.
(499 hours sleep lost on that one; finally gave up – my site won’t be what I want it to be because of lack of min/max width).
thanks for asking.
Surely you mean not ?
Ok, I’ve had enough already… you people convinced me… I just downloaded Firefox.
I have one specific request; Make IE work in accordance with the standards. It’s as simple as that! IEs ignorant approach towards established web standards *is* the real-world problem web developers are facing every day.
If you’re looking for more work; A more comprehensive (and as such more usable) implementation of CSS2 is very much desirable!
Although not directly related to the development of IE, you might want to visit for some interesting reading…
Oh, and it’s
This story is in dire need for a slashdotting… Any takers?
Fixed that link; thanks.
child selector (>)
:first-child
:before
:after
min-width, min-height
max-width, max-height
:hover on elements other than links
attribute selectors img[alt="new photo"]
display: block on links should make the entire link clickable, not just the text…this is currently buggy.
transparent pngs (in a non-proprietary way)
Standards? So far the Microsoft standard has been: take control away from the users as much as possible!
When installing Windows, the user can not decide to NOT install IE, and if they could (with older versions of Windows) they would find that regardless of their choice, it was STILL installed!
And then Microsoft decided that THEY should have control over when and what upgrades the user should automatically download/install. And the system used to do that is the main security risk in Windows/IE. And since Windows won’t function without IE, the chance of the core being compromised is much bigger. And then mister G. keeps telling us to SWITCH auto-update ON, because that would give us security???
The user should have much more control over their OWN computers. That’s the standard in acceptable behaviour!
Only at the time when IE fully and correctly renders every standards-compliant web-page, AND is less prone to all kinds of attacks, AND is NOT an integral part of the OS anymore, THEN may any Microsoft spokesman dare speak of standards!
Hi Matt,
I agree with you that IE’s position in the market is still dominant now and for the forseeable future. I still think that the opportunities arising from this have been squandered up to this point, but definitely think they can be still be capitalized on.
However, I disagree with what you go on to say. It’s absurd to claim that the moaning about lack of compliance with web standards is the problem. When the web community constructs and agrees upon a standard for the furtherance of the medium, it is not unwarranted to call for compliance. It is certainly not unreasonable to call for such compliance years after the advent of the standard. (Remember, CSS2 was recommended in May of 1998, almost SEVEN years ago). Developers have indeed been caught up in the Firefox ‘hype’. But it is not so much hype, as you call it, as it is relief and excitement at a browser capable of rendering content in a way far closer to the standard than IE is capable of. To say that developers are developing for a minor platform, and that this is the problem, is just plain wrong. Developers are still developing for IE by and large, because the target audience is IE and it would be impossible not to develop for it. However, it is the glaring contrast between Firefox and IE that really brought this issue to a head. It is not cheek to complain about IE’s shortcomings, nor backwards thinking to ask that the flagship browser of the flagship operating system installed on the vast majority of the world’s PC workstations render at least as well as other browsers with nothing more than a negligible minority of the market.
If someone makes it all the way down here….
No 1 for me would be max/min-width/height.
No 2 (for me) :hover on all elements
No 3 position: fixed.
No 4 the <q> tag.
As for CSS 3 not being yet being a standard, follow Gecko and Opera and support partial/experimental implementations prefixed by "-ie". Like in "-moz-border-radius" or "-o-replace". (Yeah, I know Opera didn’t get this right until version 7.x)
Generally MSIE should avoid using the real W3C-name when something is not up to the spec, and always prefix proprietary solutions.
On a more general level I think MSIE is too "forgiving". When pages are badly coded and servers are badly configured – LET IT SUCK! Don’t "fix it" in the browser. Newbies get bad habits because of this. I teach webdesign i senior high school (in Sweden). I spend more time moving students away from bad habits than I actually spend time teaching them the correct semantics from scratch.
Well, I just took too much time and actually read to the bottom. No posts since the 15th. Hmmm.
Basically my opinion is as follows:
If IE does not adopt the same standards as other web browsers, then I plan to provide a link to download the compliant browser and explain to my site users that IE is broken and this download will fix it. End of story.
I am sick and tired of developing in one hour a layout that works wonderfully in all browsers but IE and then spending hours trying to find the offending line of code that makes IE croak and plugging in little fixes that screw up the layout in the standard browsers. So I plan to use those hours with my family and let my site users spend a few minutes downloading a browser that works on not just my site but all sites!
I don’t believe that M$ will ever adopt these standards that we have asked for. They never have in the past. That would mean they have to play by the same rules as everybody else. That would mean playing fair! Oh yeah! THAT’s gonna’ happen’! Yeah Right!
Quirk (noun).
"Quirk" mode is not ACCEPTABLE!!!!!!!
It’s real nice you supported CSS right away — it would have been nice if you ever finished support for HTML (what’s a Q element, anyway?) !!
One more little thing that’s really number zero. Before one that is. Remove this really annoying bug:
An XML-declaration before the doctype makes the browser go into quirks-mode. How stupid isn’t that!
I know it has been mentioned, but it’s worth repeating.
Please implement a feature, where I can click a button and IE 7 always remembers to open maximized. I resized a window and ever since, IE 6 has been opening every window the same way.
I tried fixing it through the quick launch IE link, but it still does not work.
Another great post. Keep it up!
I think the BEST thing MS could do at this point is push their huge market share or users towards a browser that will actually DO something about supporting standards, like Firefox/Mozilla, etc.
If you are truely concerned for the end-user, you would tell them to stop using your broken, vunerable, buggy, browsers and upgrade to something built ON standards. I have lost all faith in Microsoft’s ability to create any piece of software that actually DOES what it says it can. Remember MS, IE is an INTERNET EXPLORER, therefore, why don’t you focus on how it works (by itself) viewing webpages and not on how you can make the OS better becuase of it. If you had had this foucs in the begining, maybe IE Mac wouldn’t have been the biggest letdown for web developers worldwide.
> there is no CSS3 standard yet
No, but several of the specifications have reached candidate recommendation status, which means they are ready for implementing.
I don’t care about CSS 3 (yet), so long as you fix the more immediate problems. But at least say "we don’t plan on implementing it yet" instead of hiding behind excuses.
From the IE7 post:
> I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.”
I’ve been holding my tongue for the past few posts, because "IE and standards" was on your list of upcoming posts, so I was hoping it was only a matter of time.
But as I read this post, it struck me that you’ve said absolutely nothing about what specifications you plan on supporting. Where is all that commitment you guys have been talking about? Commit to something already! I’ve never read so many words that say so little. I can sum up this post in a couple of short sentences:
* Internet Explorer has not regressed in support for the W3C specifications.
* People who trigger strict mode won’t be ensured backwards compatibility, people who trigger quirks mode will.
* You are aware of the problems everybody is complaining about.
However you have managed to use some seven hundred words to say this, while completely skipping the one thing that everybody wants to know – what specifications will you attempt to comply with?
Ian asked a very specific question with respect to the support for CSS 1; it has been ignored in favour of arguing whether something should be called a "Windows patch" or an "Internet Explorer patch".
I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and lay off a bit, but guys, you’re making it really difficult for us to do anything but criticise, and I’m sure it’s even less fun for you than it is for us. How about you simply cut out the verbiage and the marketing speak, and write in short, succinct sentences instead of padding it out as if it were a school essay? Ten words are far more valuable than a hundred if they say the same thing.
Here’s a really easy one: the PNG alpha channel. Fixing it won’t break backwards compatibility, and the support is already sort-of there. Can you commit to implementing the PNG alpha channel? A simple yes or no, please.
> vague demands for open-ended “standards support” […] don’t really help us
When people say that without elaborating, I assume it’s because they are tired of listing the same items over and over again. for what it’s worth, here’s my list:
CSS 2 or CSS 2.1, at your discretion.
PNG 1.
HTML 4.01.
HTTP 1.1.
Excluding the special circumstances surrounding CSS 2.1, all of those specifications are over five years old – published before Internet Explorer 5.5 was released. If Internet Explorer 7.0 doesn’t implement them, then us web developers will be working around the problems for another five years.
> All this moaning about web standards is indicative of a simple problem – that web developers have gotten caught up in Firefox hype and chosen to develop for a minor platform.
The W3C specifications are implemented across Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, Omniweb and a few others. Microsoft helped develop those specifications, and then did a half-hearted job of implementing them. It isn’t "Firefox hype", it’s Microsoft not playing nice with the rest of the industry and holding back the web.
I’ve read through several of these blog entries from people on the IE team and there is one common theme when it comes to the discussion of standards. Lots of whining about vague feedback regarding requests for standards implementation in the next version of IE from the MS employee….followed by dozens of very specific requests regarding CSS2, pseudo classes, XHTML, DOCTYPE, PNG, etc.
Stop pretending that you have only received vague requests.
Today the Web Standards Project and Microsoft have announced the formation of a collaborative Task Force that will provide technical help in moving Microsoft products like Visual Studio and ASP.NET closer to web standards….
There is much discussion about witch Standards should be supportet in IE7 – I want to agree and extend this list with:
XLink (at least simple)
MathML
If IE7 doesn’t support CSS2 I think its safe to say that will be the straw that broke the camels back in terms of supporting Microsoft’s browser while developing. This is totally pathetic an unexcusable behavior and as a designer I’ll be outraged if I have to wait YEARS longer for something some browsers have been doing right for half a decade. Just for Microsoft? Nope.. I don’t think so. Myself and many others will start a campaign to refuse to support IE because it will be the new Netscape 4. If you don’t cut it, you don’t cut it. No excuse gets you included. Thats right.. time vote IE off the island. IE is the weakest link, goodbye. IE, you’re fired.
Now if they can get their act together and support the standard I’ll be MORE than happy to develope for it. Why? Because "developing for IE" will be a meaningless statement due to the fact that I’m simply adhering to the standard.
Getting full css2 support isn’t that hard, any decent programmer could do it. Why not quit arguing and just do it.
Shouldn’t
"X is compliant with Microsoft’s Standard Y"
have the same definition as
"Microsoft’s X is compliant with Standard Y" ?
I would like to see Microsoft’s IE use the same testing process for W3C ‘compliance’ as they use to declare a product ‘XP compliant’.
If you can’t pass the test be truthful and declare your product as ‘tested with’ just like some old 16 bit apps have been ‘tested with’ XP.
Oh my gosh! I just thought of something! You gotta implement updates for standards via Windows Update. When CSS3 is finalized…2 days later I wanna see Windows Update push to millions of people the update for that.
Now THAT is not only awesome, but is sooo required.
I mean I’m still not going to use it…I need my Firefox extentions and tabs(and stability).
I said my piece here:
Some commenters did too.
By now, I would be happy with:
- Full CSS2 support (and correctly)
- XHTML 1.1 support
Please!
What Jim said two posts up. Amen.
I’m starting to get annoyed at the IE team claiming that not wanting to break web pages is holding them up from implementing changes. Had MS not let IE development die off for the past X years, and worked on addressing the issues folks are using hacks and etc to fix now, these hacks would not have become prevelent and the corrections would have been easy to make.
You dug your own hole, please stop expecting us to feel sorry for you having a hard time getting out of it.
I heard the same cry for years, but MS didn’t care. Why did they start caring now? Not because of you, people! It’s because there is a new kid on the block — Firefox.
The best way to make MS come up with a better IE is to use Firefox, and tell you friends to use Firefox, and tell your mom and dad and neighbors and uncles and anties to use Firefox.
MS doesn’t really care about you if you think about it. They only care when you don’t use IE, so don’t use IE. Then they will care.
Der Riese regt sich… Im Februar machte Microsofts Chef-Architekt Bill Gates zwei Ankündigungen, welche wichtig sein könnten in bezug auf das World Wide Web. Mantragleich hat er größere Interoperabilität mit Software anderer Hersteller zugesichert; desweiteren hat er den Internet Explorer…
Can I hear a ‘pwned’?
As I see it from here, for Microsoft to once again ask us what they need to do to improve IE in the next version is a thinly veiled attempt to avoid responsibility for the outcome. If they haven’t heard the hue and cry for CSS 2 and full PNG by now, they aren’t interested in hearing it. If they were listening, this blog post would have started with what they already planned on doing based on what they had heard, and a request for clarification of what they heard, and if they missed anything.
Instead we have this pretense of involvement. It is not a dialouge, it is two simultaneous monologues with Microsoft rattling on saying things, and the rest of us rattling on at the same time. From the outside it might look like a conversation, but it is not. Microsoft already has whatever passes for a plan in their world for the future of IE, and they are fishing now for memorable quotes to use later when they tell us that they were listening.
Whatever they don’t include, they will say that they asked us, and we weren’t clear enough in our responses, so it’s our fault, not theirs.
Typical bureaucratic CYA behavior. I’m sure that’s how you have to behave to survive for any length of time at MS, just like at any other major corporation.
It would be nice if we can see TAB based support in future IE version
Interesting, that my post pointing out that microsoft has no interest nor benefit in making a standards compliant browser was deleted.
Remember this post! It will be CENSORED soon!
Here are the link I pointed to:
.
Microsoft please implement full CSS2 support.
Nice semtiments, but how about some specific promises? Will you be supporting PNGs properly in IE7? position: fixed? :hover on all elements? Will the strange bug that causes text to move when hovered over be sorted? overflow: hidden?
Sorry, but saying you know about standards means nothing when you’ve promised support for so many things before and failed to deliver…
What about CSS "box model" in IE 7.0? Any plans?
It would definately be good to see JPEG2000 support in IE 7. I have developed numerous web sites that could have looked better and loaded faster had I been able to use JPEG2000 instead of the outdated JPEG format. Most of the world is still using dialup and images play a large part in making web pages look good, but they are also the main cause of slow load times.
Here is a list of resources on JPEG2000 for those that aren’t familiar with it:
If IE 7 were to support JPEG2000 by default it could much more easily spread across the web.
I’m sure you’ve heard it well over 1000 times, but full CSS2 support would be pretty darn high on my list. Full PNG support would be amazing as well. Jim said it very well.
And the next thing is:
404 error page less than 512 bytes –
Will IE 7.x display its own error page that includes a link to the MSN network search engine rather than "on-site" 404 error page?
I just think it’s hilarious that you guys are blowing all this hot air about "we’re committed to standards", and then we see this:
I realize you think the only way to fend off these "alternate" browsers like Firefox is to continue with the embrace and extend strategy, but in the end that’s just going to get web developers more angry than they already are at you.
Why don’t you make a BETTER PRODUCT than Firefox that follows all the current web standards (and I don’t mean XUL or CSS3)? That may actually turn the tide against these other browsers rather than just fending them off for the time being. After all, I started using IE because it was better than Netscape at the time. I use Firefox because it’s better than IE right now.
Better products always win over slimy business tactics in the end, especially with people who know better.
I would really like to see full PNG support (with alpha) and JPEG 2000.
JPEG 2000 will never be adopted until IE implements it. It’s time has come!
A 90% Browser share means IE is the standard.
I’m pissed when Opera and Firefox don’t display pages correctly that look and work just fine in IE.
On Friday morning there was some maintenance being done by the blogs.msdn.com people and apparently that dropped a chunk of comments out of our blog.
So rather than the heavy weight of oppression you seem to feel, Peter, it was probably just that glitch. Your post doesn’t violate the comment guidelines so it won’t get deleted.
BTW we had a number of fake comments the other day that were deleted. The person posted as me, or Dave Massy, etc. I’ve seen a few blogs now that took those comments at face value and should not have.
Another lesson in "you can’t always believe everything you read" even if you want to…
Well, there’s another reason to keep people in my department on Firefox.
I would personnaly enjoy CSS 2.1 and PNG 24-bit full correct support.
Even position:fixed, etc. (I would really enjoy SVG too)
But I disagree when I heard that "CSS 1 is fully supported".
background-attachment: fixed; works only with the body tag, not for all tags.
So what is this all about?
That’s pretty discouraging to think that MS is forcing us to continue to hack for its browser. Wether they see it as flawed or not it is the current standard. Committes are set up for a reason and wether we all agree with them or not they decide on the greater good.
Support for IE is waning in design circles – and this won’t help much. Even now I just get IE to look good enough and focus on supporting the features of more advanced browsers. Until IE steps up it will continue to be a major thorn in the side of the people who are making content.
Do we all have to boycott IE to facilitate what should be a standard evolutionary step in IEs development?
Some things I haven’t seen mentioned:
* Support for data URL images (). When using XML/XSL, the use of this can save lots of additional requests for small images.
* Repair the image cache bug. IE6 will get 1000 identical images from the server when they are needed, in stead of loading just one and using it 1000 times.
* Repair the XML cache. XML is not cached properly.
* Repair the multipart/formdata boundary bug (file-upload) bug with "charset=iso-8859-1". (It is little known, but I have spent nonetheless a lot of time figuring out why some uploads went wrong, unpredictable but regular).
> When we shipped IE 6.0, we finally fully supported CSS 1,
If this is true, how come this testcase fails?
From
"One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it."
Why? WHY? CSS2.1 and/or CSS 3 support implies (and necessitates) support for CSS2. Why, then, wait even LONGER to support the proper standards when a proper foundation in CSS2 support would make it easier, in the long run, to support these newer standards? Furthermore, CSS2.1 is in Candidate Reccomendation status as are parts of CSS3. In my experience, few changes are made between "CR" and full-blown "R." Not to mention that CR-level support of any CSS standard would be the best CSS support IE will have ever had.
Please understand that Internet Explorer is generally abhorred by the web development community. Abhorred! Sure, you can rest on your laurels because you know at the end of the day people will MAKE it work in IE, because it’s their job to make it work in IE. Or, you can make the lives of millions of people easier while improving the Internet experience for your customers. You pick.
My biggest gripe is that theres no way to write a single line of DHTML code that will work in more than one browser. The DOMs are far enough apart that writing a dynamic web page becomes a nightmare, even with the help of XB scripting libs. Then top that off with the rendering issues (select boxes that float to the top of everything but an IFrame, Abs positioned Divs that don’t float right or play well with others…). The page might look great in IE but appears as a pile of excrement in Moz… Then there’s support for events in IE that are not standard or available in other browsers… I’m not playing a favorite and personally, I don’t want to. I just want to be able to develop a page with a single set of source that will work in every renderer out there that has more than a 5 percent market share… is that too much to ask?
DNagel:
You can today create cross-browser applications that work fine in IE 6, Mozilla and Opera. Just look at google maps, google suggest and tons of DHTML apps out there.
You just need to spend some time learning the standards better and you will be able to write code that works in all browsers without browser sniffers.
Here’s an idea…
Hire Dean Edwards (), he seems to have a better grasp of what needs done, and that guy is a genius.
> You just need to spend some time learning the standards better
This is simply not true. Internet Explorer doesn’t support the DOM event model. If DNagel "learned the standards better" as you suggest, it wouldn’t help him in the slightest, because nothing he would write would work in Internet Explorer.
If there is any truth in this
then the IE team is seriously letting us down, and all the big words in the above blog post didn’t mean schmuck.
Yes, about the event model, true. But still, learning some tweaks you can make things work in all browsers.
I’ll put it simply. Your browser’s (or should I say your higher-ups’?) inability to support web standards has given me extra hours of headache for every bit of web coding I have to do. Web development is now a hassle of hacks to get your broken browser to display 100% standards-compliant code correctly. Microsoft appears to be continuing its anti-interoperability position.
Apparently, IE7 still won’t be supporting CSS2. Thanks a lot, Microsoft. I’m recommending Firefox to my customers.
> learning some tweaks you can make things work in all browsers.
DNagel’s whole point is that web developers shouldn’t have to waste time learning and using workarounds to make things work in more than one browser.
There are some techniques to reduce the need to branch for different browsers a little, but in general, once you start doing something the least bit complicated, it’s a huge mess that only the browser vendors can clean up.
It would be great if all browsers developed closely to W3C standards.
Flash is also a major player to support especially with the emergence of Internet 2 and broadband gaining more acceptance by the public
Full (but wrong) CSS1 support? Remember your wrong box model?
>Hire Dean Edwards, he seems to have a better grasp of what needs done
There we go! Put Dean in charge!
W3C standards
If different browsers would focus upon reading code in ONE way that would be great.
And for the experimental coding; perhaps have a reboot program option so the browser can comprehend code differently.
Presently there are too many hoops for developers to jump through which also decreases the positive experience for the user.
Thanks for listening.
If the richest software company in the world can’t keep up with a bunch of opensource programmers on something as well-defined as standards support, then the commercial software industry is doomed, and we all should migrate to Linux as quickly as possible before history leaves us in the dust.
minghong, they fixed the box model in Internet Explorer 6.0.
bit of a departure this one, but what i’d like to see would be text overlapping (wrapping) an image up to a boundary as you can do with any DTP program, possibly using something similar to coords in an image map, this would stop text layout on the web from being blocked and make things more fluid and versatile for designers remember Copyright 2005 Mark Rushworth
and before you all start moaning, i know its not in the w3 specs – just be interesting to do thats all…
Ignoring that the CSS/XHTML ‘specs’ aren’t as much a standard as a set of specifications which browsers can comply with, the greater webdev community would be making a very large, and very smelly mistake by allowing Microsoft/IE to implement these specs at their discretion.
All I want from IE, is a fast rendering engine, a 100% ‘compliance’ with each W3C specification (no leeway, and no IE only features please), and secure browsing. Bonus features would be things such as theming, tabbed browsing, an inbuilt web search client and a truly intelligent pop up/under/over blocker, as well as anti-spyware/phishing technology..
Additionally, IE should be an optional installation in the Windows XP installation process, that completely removes any and all IE7 related system files/references such that it never exists at all. Why? Because we like control.
And if they can do all this, and have a system memory footprint of under 20Mb, I’d be impressed.
Bruce, mind commenting on what has been requested 100+ times in this blog entry…
WHAT ABOUT PNG ALPHA TRANSPARENCY!
Chris;
Thanks for soliciting input from the public regarding improvements we’d like to see in IE7.
I am a freelance Webmaster and I face the same issues everybody does in trying to create W3C Standards Compliant websites in IE. Here are my suggestions.
Security:
First of all, security related, in addition to the multiple ActiveX options there should be a single checkbox to disable ActiveX completely. If it remains unchecked then the existing options can fine-tune ActiveX permissions.
Second, also security related, there is danger in adding IDN support. It can be used to spoof domain names using non-English characters, which has been mentioned recently on Securia. Firefox just had to be upgraded to close this vulnerability. I tested it myself using Firefox, and the addressbar showed that I was on Paypal.com when in fact I was on a test page from Securia, with misspelled IDN characters fooling the browser. We already have enough problem with phishing schemes.
In relation to the above IDN and phishing issues, it might be a nice feature to include the equivilant of Spoofstick (the updated version that detects IDN attacks), so people will know that they are really on the website showing in the addressbar.
CSS:
I am contantly creating hacks to make IE display layouts the same as Firefox (yes,I use doctype declarations). Here are some of the things I would like to see corrected (to W3C CSS-2):
Most of these problems involve floated DIVs in CSS-P layouts with three vertical columns, and a full with top header and bottom footer.
Floated elements almost make it, but the space under them is treated differently than FF. Take the example of a left-floated navigation sidebar, width:120px, with a margin-right of 10px, with main content to its right side. Add an ordered or unordered list to the text that goes to the right of the sidebar and the dots or numbers in the list items are shown inside the border of the sidebar while the list items are not indented at all from the left side, but line up with the rest of the text. I have to place the list inside a DIV with a margin-left of 150px or more, to make the dots/numbers move to the right and to indent the list item text. This hack is fine unless the list overflows the height of the sidebar, in which case it stays that number of pixels away from the left edge, while plain text moves to the edge, less any padding I set. I don’t know where the fault lies, but it is frustrating having to hack list items around floats.
Min-width, max-width, min-height, max-height, in addition to the existing width and height.
Position:fixed
Parent>child {codes}
* selector
The Peekaboo defect needs to be fixed. Layouts with floats, like form fields that are floated left and right sometimes need to have the browser resized horizontally before they display correctly, and ditto with styled IFrames.
The need to declare height:1% to make a CSS-P DIV extend the full height should be remedied.
While there are hacks that I can apply to force IE to display these things correctly they cause my stylesheets to fail to validate with the W3C CSS Validator. That’s not right at all. These CSS-2 standards have been around for years now. Why has Microsoft failed to add support for, or correct problems with the various CSS positioning, padding and floating element problems that are so well documented?
Wizcrafts Computer Services
Having the :hover pseudo class work for all elements would be very nice.
There are a number of issues I have come up against when using <li> and css, if these could be fixed that would be great.
Also if the above is a commitment to making strict mode better regardless of how it affects existing pages then I applaud it.
I would really like to see in IE7 all of the features which I can find in Avant Browser ().
The most needed think is : TABBED BROWSING !!!!
Another VERY useful are Groups (which means Group of Bookmark).
Thanx and good work.
"The W3C specifications are implemented across Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, Omniweb and a few others."
But not identically. And not completely.
Which is rather the point.
I’m having some specific problems with a project i’m working on at the moment. I’m using tables for layout however (and i know many developers want this deprecated) – but so far it has been working great for me, especially in IE…
But, of course, i’ve stumbled across a serious bug/limitation. I don’t really know how to name/describe the problem, but it’s related to align and % specified heights – and more :p.
So, opinions about table layout aside, i’ve set up an example page to demonstrate the issue:
There’s also a link to change quirks mode on and off, which actually demonstrates 2 different problems.
>># re: IE and Standards 3/10/2005 6:48 AM Eli. <<
Amen to that, Eli. I don’t know a thing about Avalon/XAML, and it one post points out it lacks the universality that standards intend to achieve, but in that regard it is no better or worse than the W-3’s so-called "standards." I don’think the W-3 really understand grassroots web development, only their own utopian (read unrealistic) visions and a slavish devotion to high level programmers.
If CSS 2 were 100% supported tomorrow it would be ten years, if ever (and I’ll wager never), before CSS layouts are even a plurality on the web. The fact is that CSS 2 is a lousy "standard," a pseudo-standard to borrow from its own vernacular. It would require web design become the exclusive purview of programmers and CSS 2 cultists, which it never will, no matter what browsers do or do not support.
Please, please please, as well as all the above, could you please include an XForms 1.0 implementation:
I think he’s hinting at supporting PNG alpha transparency. As in: without resorting to all kinds of ActiveX hacks. You know, just drop in a PNG24 image and have it actually display the way it was meant to be.
For an example of this behavior, see Firefox, Opera, IE/Mac (!) and just about any graphical browser other than IE/Win, released somewhere after, say, 1996.
Of course, he could be talking about other PNG alpha transparencies, but this one springs to mind first… =]
By the way Chris, you’re one of those people we have to count on if we want to see IE7 to be a better browser. People like you in important positions should really raise their voices for standards compliance, as you have done.
If no such thing happens, we’ll just see another buggy non-standard browser that’ll postpone the realization of standards compliant and semantic web another 5 or 7 years. This is likely to happen since Microsoft doesn’t really gain anything if they just make a bunch of web developers happy. Their target are the lay users who can easily be fooled to switch back to IE from Firefox with an effective marketing strategy.
Previous bad business strategy has made people at Microsoft think that breaking as many standards as possible (embracing proprietary techniques) would gain them a bigger market share. This must be avoided for the sake of the future of the web. It’s time to grow up.
That’s by far the only thing I’m interested in here. Otherwise this will become another tough decade for web design, but when we really should be moving on.).
Please Please and Please : keep compatibility when running in quirks mode if you won’t. I personally don’t care about that mode.
But you should ! No ! You *MUST* improve the standard compliance mode without asking you if it’ll break something. If you follow W3C specs you don’t have to bother about if it would break some pages or not.
If a webpage got a DOCTYPE that means the developper knows what he’s doing. If his page isn’t valid, that’s his problem not yours.
BTW what I would really like to see in IE7 (in no particular order):
- Real PNG support (with alpha layer)
- application/xhtml+xml MIME type support (with correct ACCEPT header sended by the browser)
- Full CSS 1 & 2 support (nevermind CSS 3 for now)
- Full HTML and XHTML (all versions) support
- Full ECMAScript support
with all of that included I think you could call MSIE a browser…
Well I’m no web designer super-being but what I’d like to see for IExplorer is >its seperation< from the operating system.
It was a big thing for MS to design the OS around a browser but when it catches a virus, it >brings the WHOLE system< down with it – usually requiring a reinstall.
Being able to seperately uninstall IE and reinstalling it to eliminate problems would be a breath of fresh air.
Granted it may not solve ALL attacks but it certainly beats reinstalling the whole OS simply over a web browser virus.
Sandbox IE and make the whole OS much more secure.
Hi,
as for new requests…. (tried to open a request but the answer is "By design").
The behavior of "save page" and "send page by email" isn’t very ortogonal.
If the page is displayed from a "POST" request doing a "save page, html only" works ok (it takes page content from the browser cache)
Others save methods and "send page by email" didn’t take the content from the cache and does a GET (instead of POST) resulting in wrong infos handled.
So the feature should be corrected or the menu text corrected (something like "Save as->RELOADED Web page, complete")
Michael,
Your first stop should be the specifications. Instead of assuming that some other browser is getting it right and Internet Explorer is getting it wrong, read the specifications to find out what should happen. CSS 2.1 says this:
"CSS 2.1 does not specify rendering when the specified table height differs from the content height, in particular whether content height should override specified height; if it doesn’t, how extra space should be distributed among rows that add up to less than the specified table height"
Basically, there’s no "correct" rendering for the code you are using.
When debugging problems like this, it’s usually best to reduce the testcase to the smallest amount of valid code that is necessary to demonstrate the problem. This makes the browser developers’ jobs easier, and you’ll often find the source of the problem as you are doing so.
In this particular case, it seems you could completely remove the width and horizontal alignment code and still demonstrate the problem. That’s immediately eliminated some possible sources of the problem already.
For what it’s worth, that code seems unnecessarily complex for what it is you seem to be trying to do, and if you’d just ditch the tables that apparently don’t "work great" as you claim, you’d find things a lot easier to implement.
You need IE6’s problems laid out as a clear list, with a precise demonstration of each problem "in action"? Dean the Dude has done that…
<a href=""></a>
You could pick through the pages of all those other sites you mention, disect all the emotional rants on this blog, eventually come up with a semi-coherent list of the problems and EVENTUALLY agree amongst yourselves on which ones to fix… or you could <a href="">buy in</a> a cool-headed, unemotional EXPERT and get a better result in a shorter time. If I had your dev budget I know which option I’d choose. Make the man an offer he can’t refuse! Pay Dean Edwards <a href="">lots of money</a>, fly him over the pond to Seattle and make him an "IE Bug Guru" or an "IE Standards Compliance Evangelist".
What are you waiting for?
Max, I don’t think that’s the real Bruce, just somebody who thinks it’s funny to post under his name.
First of all, congratulations Chris on becoming a parent. I trust mother and Chris 2.x are doing well?
Let’s all hope that you can be as proud of seeing IE7 into the world as you undoubtedly are about your own personal addition to the population.
<aside>Do Microsoft developers have codenames for unreleased offspring?</aside>
Anyhoo. I have only recently jumped on board the web standards bandwagon and have to admit that IE6 does make learning difficult. I like to think I produce valid markup (it correctly validates at any rate). And my stylesheets seem to be written properly, but when I view the results in IE6 the distance between A and B suddenly seems a lot further.
I’d be very surprised if you did not already know what you should be including, standards-wise, in IE7 – I just trust you can deliver.
Good luck.
IE Blog: IE and Standards Chris Wilson guarantees the IE team cares about and will improve standards support – on a webpage that doesn’t validate, no less (categories: webdesign standards IE)…
日本人！！
I second the above mentioned standards. But how about this, which would not even break backwards compliance:
Fix whitespace issues for styled lists. You need to remove all whitespace in the HTML source to avoid extra line breaks in some styled lists.
Lack of support for Vector Graphics is our single biggest issue (ability to draw dynamically created simple shapes on screen).
SVG seems to be the way to go as it’s now a standard.
- will IE7 support SVG ??
Thanks for taking comments from the outside world. Whether you act on them or not is another matter, but we appreciate the means to say what we feel officially and not get an autoresponder email!
My only request is that you make IE7 compatible, please don’t try and out-do the other browsers by saying "but our method works better and is a closer representation of wc3 blah blah blah …" just make it so I only have to build ONE version of my website that will work in ALL browsers, including IE.
Thanks!
Mike
Jim hit the nail on the head here in his post above. I came here and saw the title "IE and Standards" and thought, "Finally, we can get some answers about the future of standards support in IE7." While reading your post I kept waiting for some of those answers to show up and by the end I was sighing and thinking that once again, no answers were provided and there was a lot of filler to dance around the issue.
I’ll ask Jim’s question again for him in case you need it:
"What specifications will you attempt to comply with?"
Why won’t you answer?
Jim,
There is 2 problems I wanted to demonstrate, and depending on standards mode, always 1 of them are broke, that’s why my code is more or less the minimum code.
The issue is:
1) placing any object inside a TD with a height specified in % can not be vertically aligned.
2) Creating a table of say 500px height, and saying that row 1 is 100px, IE doesn’t distribute the remaining (400px) to row 2.
I believe IE thinks something like "row 1 is 100px and row 2 doesn’t have a height, that probably means row 1 is bigger, so let’s divide the 500px and let row 1 have a bigger share…"
and the bottom line is:
- Quirks mode shows problem 1 correct, but problem 2 wrong.
- Standards mode shows problem 1 wrong, but problem 2 correct.
Anyway, i’m not really looking for user comments here – it’s more to inform IE developers.
Blimey Dean, I can feel myself coming over all paranoid again ;o)
There are a lot of words there but not a lot of promises. Its getting to the stage now where even an admission that you plan to make no standards based changes to IE’s rendering engine would be better than the above. Should I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this was a pre-emptive post to the one you’ll be very soon be making about what you plan to support/not support?
You asked for specifics, so:
CSS2 (full)
PNG (full)
are absolute must haves.
XHTML
would be nice.
bah, switch the two bottom lines
Quirks shows problem 2 correctly. The confusion…
Most all of the good suggestions have already been made here. I just have a couple small things to add: 1) It sure would be nice if CSS-ers could control the border property of select menus. 2) the file upload field is pretty difficult to style in a pleasing manner without some CSS/JavaScript fudgery. Not sure if the standards committee addresses this issue, but it would be nice to be able to control the width, background color, and borders of the input and button parts of the field seperately.
>>.
Already done. IE already supports the step up from ActiveX .Net Applets – for an example see:
They support all the features you just mentioned all you need is the Framework (get from Windows Update or Microsoft Downloads).
I can’t edit
how about a forum instead of a blog?
The weird height calculations that i mentioned after issue #2 only appears when setting the height of the containing TD to 100% (or the height of the table)
In the times of IE5.x I was really happy it existed. But now there are good browsers out there and they are getting better. Instead of developing one yourself — with your own rendering engine — you could ship one of a (now) competitor with your OS. As far as I get it, you give it away for free anyways. I´d like an honest answer to an honest question: What´s the point of IE? Regards from Germany.
CSS2 Support
CSS3 Support as far as defined by now
I’m sure the fact that CSS2 support has been weak so far is a political issue. Microsoft wants the people to use ActiveX for having a proper user interface on a website. Each time I tried to implement pulldown menus with CSS2 over the past 6 years I almost went crazy with IE, no matter what version. With Gecko or Opera or Safari nowadays no problem.
So for the future:
1st priority -> Security
2nd priority -> W3C-Standards
3rd priority -> Features like tabbed browsing etc.
I make a drop down menu in Fireworks — it works flawlessly in everything except Explorer. Many web designers have the attitude – just go for Explorer and forget the rest since MSE is 90% of the market. Not any more. The large drop in market share on release of Firefox 1 means, to me, that a lot of people are fed up with the proprietory code and the compabibility difficulties.
Some of what people are asking for (here and elsewhere) is pretty subtle. I’d ask that you stop trying the monopoly tactics of forcing people to dance to your code. If you don’t, you’re going to lose more and more ground to Firefox and the like.
EZblog » Linkdump 10 maart
you better let IE die becous it’s nthe worst produck and nothing will bring it higher then its now. It could ony hapedn when other explorers will gon.
IE7 wishlist <Anne’s Weblog about Markup & Style>
uff, finnaly I’ve read it all
I can see Microsoft adopting XML a lot (web services, XAML…) so I think it would make sense to have latest IE fully XML-enabled. To be more specific, I’d like to see
- handling xml/application MIME type
- correct handling/parsing of DTDs (e.g XHTML1.1)
- I don’t know what else.. just will XML draw the spotlight? You know, it’s so nice to process web documents like any other documents; it’s not what people see, but it stays and falls with browser.
For CSS,
I’d really appreciate if box models etc were consistent with specs.. selectors, pseudo-elements, position:fixed… simply fix CSS1 bugs (if any) and do as much CSS2 as possible.
Last but not least, please don’t encourage bad coders – I mean, like when markup is illegal, do NOT guess and render it somehow… it could have looked like cool feature, years ago it could enable hobbist to write their homepages without being really programmers… Well, now is 2005, we have HUGE amount of meaningless markup in here (WWW) – from what could be extremely useful data. I am not complete idiot (hope you won’t delete this post because of word ‘idiot’ – no offence here
) so I see it’s not feasible to "break" majority of sites from bussines point of view… however it seems quite resonable to came "back on track" with "valid" (hehe, I hear this word everywhere these days) web – IE seems to have all it takes to satisfy like 60-70% of users now – rest are scientist, web devs and anti-MS (sorry, M$) lunatics. To satisfy the rest – myself included – support so desired standards!
—————
p.s MS guys: If you think I am playing smartass sometimes maybe I am not necessary addressing you
oops, link to myself fixed :$
Some stuff to clear up here:
- CSS3 most probably won’t ever be a full spec. That’s why they modularised it. Several modules have reached CR status. No excuses.
- Oh, and Matt:
."
Backwards thinking _by supporting standards_? Do you care about standards? Would you care about standards if you were blind and needed a screenreader that happens to be quite strict on sensible code? I most certainly think so sir.
There’s no point _at all_ in saying that HTML support is an aside job. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought HTML was the most-used web language. Oh, sorry. I guess I’m just thinking backwards.
Opera has all vulnerabilities patched, while IE has just 52% of it patched!
I’ll never again use Windows and IE. I’m a fully satisfied user of Fedora Core 3 and Opera 8 beta2.
I fear MS will NOT do the obvious.
They will not fully comply with CSS1, CSS2,
or HTML 4.01.
They will not fully comply with DOM or
the ECMAScript standards.
They will not provide PNG and SVG support.
They will not deprecate Active X.
They will not pull the browser out of the
OS. (That alone, by the way, would tell the
world that they’re SERIOUS about security.
Baking IE into the OS had NOTHING to do with
better performance/coding, as was claimed
at the time, but was a kill-Netscape maneuver).
I applaud MS for many reasons. They’re one of the key reasons we
have $500 computer systems. That, and the generally nice people who work in the trenches, are the reason
I spent a bunch of years working there.
But on the IE
front, their non-standardness and bugginess are a drag on the web. They’re only
hurting themselves, long-term, but culture is culture,
and is hard to change.
– stan
i just restate some point made by others above:
AT LEAST:
- css 2.1
- html 4.01
- DOM 1.0 (and the DOM Event Model, that’s definitely a show-stopper for *real* rich web applications)
- PNG (and, not to be just *following* who’s doing better, what about SVG?)
also, mantaini quirks mode for compatibility and make standard mode *really* standard seems to be the best option.
I’ll give M$ one more chance – when Longhorn will be released (obviously I will not install it on my computer – it would be too dangerous) but I’m sure I’ll just try and forget about it.
Bye!
Jeez, why is this such a big deal? Why is so difficult to fork on content type to a completely CSS2 compliant renderer?
You’re Microsoft. Just shut everyone up and do it.
BPWrap – Internet Marketing From A Different Point Of View
To Chris Wilson: and are you really proud of this full of vulnerabilities, slow, non-customizable, etc etc browser?
I’d like to echo a wish I’ve heard earlier.
Make the rendering engine updatable over Windows Update. You won’t need to release patches every day, but you could continually work on XHTML 2, XForms, WHATWG HTML extensions (a few are already in Safari!) and CSS3 standards and ‘patch them in’ when ready. This would be an awesome way to avoid the stagnation that have made life hard for web developers and Microsoft alike.
Furthermore, I hope that Microsoft will shuck off its "get off our backs about the rendering engine, damn it" attitude and in time for the public beta this summer set up a public bug database where we can help out in reporting all rendering issues. Implementing new standards support can’t ever be easy, and I hope you realize that the best way to go about doing this is having a dialogue with the intended users in every little small issue.
- CSS2
- PNG24
- That annoying bug with divs over select boxes where the select box shows through
- tabbed browsing
- xhtml
- mime types (XML)
- automatic RSS handlng
- DOM/ECMAScript
I’m not so bothered about having a search box built into the browser, but the above in no particular order would be nice. I also agree with the poster who suggests JPEG2000 – makes a lot of sense.
Masz racje ale nieraz ma duże problemy z twoim programem zacina się czy coś akiego :/
I am doing my best to look at this from a Microsoft perspective. What must I do to make my browser be the best in the business? Coming from that direction, here would be my wish list, in order of importance:
1. Security is, and must always be, the number one concern.
2. Complete support for HTML 4.01.
3. Complete support for CSS 2.1.
4. Complete, *native* support for PNG.
5. Complete support for DOM Level 2.
6. Complete support for HTTP 1.1.
7. Complete support for XHTML, when served as "application/xhtml+xml".
8. Complete support for SVG 1.1.
9. Complete support for those modules of CSS 3.0 that have achieved Candidate Recommendation status.
It occurs to me that "application/xhtml+xml" may provide Microsoft with a mechanism to help with backwards-compatibility, much in the same way as DOCTYPE switching did. IE developers can safely introduce rigid compliance of W3C recommendations, activated only upon receipt of pages served with that MIME type. Such pages should, of course, be handled by the XML parser, and thus be subject to the usual checks of well-formedness.
I would also encourage IE developers to seek W3C clarification when faced with ambiguities in a W3C Recommendation, so as to avoid situations like that encountered with the CSS Box Model.
Although I’d like to see additional CSS2 support (":hover" on all elements, not just anchors, "position: fixed" support, etc.) what I’d really like is to have the currently "supported" properties work correctly.
The bugs with the box model, floats, incorrect widths, etc., make developing for IE an unpleasant experience.
There are numerous lists of IE bugs on the internet, but here’s a link to a quick list of the really horrendous CSS bugs:
I just hope that if you *don’t* fix the box model and float bugs that you will also NOT FIX the comment bugs that enable the various IE filters, thus "breaking" many web sites in IE7.
We’ve been VERY VERY patient with Microsoft in trying to work around IE’s many problems, but if IE7 is both broken and the common work-around methods have been stopped you’ll likely see a lot of "This page will look better in Firefox" messages in many pages, which would do a lot to hurt "write once, run anywhere" development that standards promise, but hopefully it won’t be necessary.
To be honest, I’m happy that you’re asking the question. It’s more than we could’ve expected. I hope that you can steel yourselves to the flames and irate bashing and pick out the comments from people who have lost faith but are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that you’ll actually do something to make your product better.
"They will not deprecate Active X."
They already have done. .NET applets are designed to replace ActiveX, the security features introduced in SP2 are designed to sway developers away from using ActiveX in favour of more secure technologies.
"They will not pull the browser out of the
OS."
*sigh* not this old one. IE is not part of the OS. The Trident engine *is* part of the OS, it’s used by the help system and the shell (in 2K at least) and provides a service for third party applications. IE is a simple wrapper around Trident.
Providing the ability to remove IE is pointless, because Trident will still remain and any security vulnerabilites in that will still potentially expose the OS.
I’d like full support for:
PNG
css2
a valiant effort for:
css3
xforms
xhtml2
Heh. Thanks, Daniel, for the shill. [Aside to crowd – Daniel and I know each other through long history on the CSS Working Group.]
Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked for a company named SPRY, Inc. on their web browser; prior to that, I was the co-author of the Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first successful mass-market web browser.
Please Microsoft! Don’t change! Please keep your broken browser, lack of support and please keep IE imbedded right tight into your OS. That way the rest of the world will soon see the browsers like Firefox continue their almost exponential growth to the point where the default will be compliant browsers and not hacks.
To all reading this blog:
Remember Microsoft has the money and resources to produce a fully compliant browser in a short space of time and make it available for download in a less than 20Meg pack that would blow Firefox out the water. Why don’t they? Well in my opinion they have grown so big they can’t see the internet for all the IE browsers. It is rather like languages and web sites. We hack around to allow old and useless browsers to see our sites and leave the sites all in English eliminating 60% of all web users.
Rob
Of course, I don’t understand the complications of building a browser but full support of CSS 2.1 is what we want, when do we want it? Version 7 please
To Michael (and Jim): yes, we’re aware of the oddities in table formatting, and this is one area I’ve personally requested that the CSS Working Group come up with a definitive answer for how formatting should occur, rather than the leniency in the current 2.1 spec.
on eWeek its said that there will not be full CSS2 support. So i’ve made up my mind. I will not check if my page works in IE anymore.
The funniest part is that web developers are microsofts customers as stated above, but why the **** don’t thet put CSS2 support in IE7. It doesn’t make sense…
Has Microsoft ever delivered what is said it would when it said it would?
Why bother talking to Microsoft?
They simply ask for comments to appease their customers and then do as they always have, what ever they please with total disregard to their customer’s wishes and requests.
It is like talking to a wall, you are better off saving your breath and developing for the minor browsers. Then Microsoft will get the point. We won’t stand for their bull any longer. We can speak with our wallets and force them to listen. If we develop our webpages to the standards and their competition does a better job of rendering those standards, then Microsoft will eventually be forced to comply also by virtue of ecomonics.
One more general statement – I am reading all these comments (yes, even all the way down here) and collecting this feedback. I appreciate all the commentary, even the negative ones.
I would love to be able to give more detail about what we’re doing, but I’m simply not allowed to do so right now. I am pushing to do so as soon as possible.
Finally, I’m personally actually on parental leave starting today, so my appearance on the blog may be spotty for the next 4 weeks; don’t be surprised if I drop off from time to time.
From your text at the top of this page:
By contrast, vague demands for open-ended “standards support” […] don’t really help us drive our development very much.
Well, they should! Ask any politician: the important thing is to be aware of, and respond to, the "mood" of the people. 99.99% of the posts here are asking for standards support (though the level of detail supplied varies). That indicates the mood of the people. You’ll have an uphill task "selling" any IE-next release that is not in tune with that mood.
My two-penny contribution to the twilight of this discussion:
1) There is no need for anyone to be pedantic about "absolute" adherence to CSS standards. Define the task in terms of the end-result: one set of HTML/CSS code should look "more or less" the same in any browser. That’s almost the DEFINITION of a web-browser – an application that displays marked-up text and images in a consistent, predicatble fashion. Period.
2) Nobody will begrudge or critisise Microsoft for supporting proprietary features OVER AND ABOVE A BASIC ADHERENCE TO STANDARDS. So your rich-client profitability can be assured.
3) As I stated a few days ago, here’s your work list for CSS rendering in IE-next:
Good luck!
IE 6.0 has not fully fixed positioning within a box. On some of my pages I place rounded corners in the top left and right of pages. I have to "hack" the CSS for IE 6.0, even in "fixed" box modeling mode. There appears to be about a 3 px difference between IE and Firefox (i.e., for the top left corner the absolute positioned element, I have as left: -3px; top: -3px in Firefox, I have to have left: -3px; top: 0px in IE).
I would expect full support for CSS 2.1 without having do do work-arounds. See for more quirks information on IE’s lack of full CSS support.
The biggest items as a web developer are:
1. PNG Transparency support
2. Be able to use li items for menu that can flyout either from top or left without a bunch of hacks.
3. Be able to position "stuff" properly and let the browser figure out heights. An object should expand to fit its container if you specify the height to be 100%. Let’s get rid of having to do FAUX columns.
4. Support :hover on all elements and make background swapping of images not present the jitter-bug effect, instead of having to work-around by having to store a larger image and shift it, which is the current work-around.
5. For CSS 3 support, my main interest are the selectors support (first or last item in a list, etc.)
6. I am not sure if it is a standard, but I could sure use some way to repeat page headers and footers without having to put the whole page into a table. Maybe access to IE’s header and footer controls at the on print event.
Cheers,
TC
If you really want to make things difficult why not just drop GIF support?
Strict mode in IE7 has to be one of two things: when it comes to css, fully complaint so that hacks are no longer needed except for the older versions of your browser, Or partially complaint and still requiring hacks.
I have little doubt that the second option is for you based on your past performance, and that the standard will not be fully implimented. If this is the case please fix some of the major issues that is holding back css for design, the preferable way to make webpages.
The major things that have held me back in the past is position: fixed, :hover anything, height: auto etc. i’ve run into the majority of bugs on sites like positioniseverything.net, these in my opinion are the biggest things that you should fix.
Full PNG support is just a must, the graphics formats of the web are outdated and it’s your fault. Please fix this as well, they have so much potential.
<b>Design/rendering</b>: Of course, I’ll throw my copycat hat and say, CSS, PNG’s w/Alpha support, Plugin security prompts & tabbed browsing (ala Firefox/Avant). A mode to switch to "old" IE mode, ala Netscape 8.
As for <b>security enhancements</b>: I love how Firefox changes the address bar to a secure yellow w/a lock icon, and at the bottom is the secure lock again with it’s originator.
i’m an enterprise web app developer. My list of stuff I’d like to see in IE7:
- PNG (transparency)
- CSS2
- the <button> tag (please, please fix !!!!)
- those many annoying positioning bugs (in CSS1?)
Thanks for this site, I appreciate you guys making a decent effort to listen to your customers.
Regards,
MT
Did you post this prior to coffee? I think you mean ‘repeatedly’?
As an application developer I do have some sympathy with the plight of the IE engine and the backward compatibility problems Microsoft face. The IE engine was a great idea in it’s conception and is a powerful component even today but it’s trying to do too many things.
Sounds like a perfect excuse to leave it as core Windows and build a ‘proper’ browser instead.
>> Finally, I want you all to know that
>> specific requests and descriptions of
>> problems in the field help us tremendously
>> in prioritizing what we need to do.
Everyone knows the problems with regards to IE. It’s been known since the launch of the application which tends to give me the feeling that blogs.msdn.com is a not much more than a low cost marketing exercise. It’s good to see the MS dev team reading the posts but all the information I spent nearly an hour reading here is plastered as common knowledge across the internet and has been for many years.
>> We will continue to improve our compliance
>> under strict mode even when it breaks
>> compatibility, and under quirks mode when
>> it’s not damaging to our backwards
>> compatibility.
I find that extremely difficult to believe as it’s not economically viable to do so. Basically IE is stuck because of the chosen path MS took and I really can’t see any way for IE to keep up. The pity of this is that we all have to ‘put up’ with it..
Does anyone have a copy of the post where gecko was mentioned as the new rendering engine? I read a blog today saying that it appeared and was deleted along with all associated posts?
In my opinion, fixing the existing bugs in the rendering engine is much more important than implementing more of the CSS2 spec (although this is important too). As web developers, it’s the bugs, rather than lack of support for certain things that cause us the most problems. Looking through the list on Position Is Everything I’d particularly like to see fixes for: the peekabo bug (argh!), 3px jumping text and the line height issue.
I’d also strongly suggest that there is some sort of public beta for IE 7. The community has been waiting for an IE update for so long that we’ll basically beta test any updates to the rendering engine for you. The number of sites documenting the IE CSS bugs should demonstrate the community’s willingness to do this.
The absolute worst case scenario for us would be if IE7 is released with new rendering bugs, and then there are no updates for another 2+ years.
Putting aside the CSS stuff, I’d also like to see:
* application/xhtml+xml MIME type support
* alpha transparency PNGs (as if you haven’t heard that enough!)
* the remaining things missing from HTML4 (abbr etc.)
In an ideal world it’d be nice to have some sort of idea what the IE team are going to be doing long-term for web standards. An earlier comment mentioned a development roadmap – this would be great. At the moment it seems like IE7 might be a "quick fix" in an attempt to win back some market share. If you really want to win back the hearts of web developers you need to play catch up with Firefox and put your backing behind the new emerging standards.
CSS3 might not be official yet but I think these things would move forward much quicker if people knew it would actually be implemented into IE. From the W3C’s point of view, what’s the point in progressing CSS3 if the main (4 year old) web browser doesn’t even fully support CSS2 yet, and there’s no indication that it ever will?
These things are important for the future of the Web, and at the moment IE is holding it back.
Eli what are you on about?
"but don’t bother implementing some deprecated recommendation."
Which recommendation are you refering to? XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and so on are all recommendations which are not deprecated.
Oh, and why not include PNG transparency. You asked for our input and now you’re going to turn your back to us.
We want transparency support for PNG’s(among other things listed above).
As a web developer, I’m so sick of having to include IE hacks into my cascading style sheets. One purpose of having standards is so that if I do my job, your browser will display my work correctly.
Since Microsoft is still the big gorilla in OS and browser usage, the LEAST you can is to make the next version FULLY 2.0 standards compliant, thus fixing all of the buggy behavior your browsers exibit.
Your current corporate behavior simply drives more people to Firefox.
Internet Exploder DOES NOT have full support of CSS1. Example? Here you are:
I’m coming into this a bit late in the game, but I’d like to see support for CSS tables. They put all (well, most) of the flexibility of table-based layouts into CSS, where it should be, and save us from messing around with float-based layouts that fall apart in the face of unexpected content.
Other than that, I have no specific wishes other than that what *is* implemented is implemented correctly. There is a bunch of things which are implemented wrong, and these cause me much more trouble than the stuff that isn’t implemented at all.
Add native support for EXSLT functionality.
"We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility, and under quirks mode when it’s not damaging to our backwards compatibility."
the above quote is quite concerning… all you people using DOCTYPE’s to force strict mode in IE should be scared :
My opinion: blah blah blah.
Bruce Morgan [MSFT] wrote:
"People are repeatingly asking about Alpha Transparencies in PNG’s. Let me put this to rest by saying that at this stage we have no plans to implement alpha transparency in PNG’s."
Fair enough to get a yes/no answer. I look forward to many more of those in this blog. If the answer was a "Yes" then no explanation would have been needed. However, since it was a "No" I am sure the follow-up question by everyone asking for that feature is:
WHY?
Simon Jesey’s list. I’ll add E4X as a very nice to have feature… though you could hold that off for 7.1 if it came in a timely manner.
On non-standards front… remove ActiveX. It’s your biggest problem with security, and what you get beat up with the most by the MS bashers. I know there are ways to disable it according to security settings, but this can be complicated to do and you’ve gone too far in allowing naive users to enable. Just remove the sucker entirely. The only folks that need it are corporations running intranet web applications. For them, the solution is a plugin that re-enables ActiveX (with as much security as you can possibly give the sucker, as you’re doing now with the browser). Draconian and difficult, but that’s the point. It encourages them to rewrite their applications to be more secure, i.e. not use ActiveX. In the mean time, it doesn’t leave them with out options.
>People are repeatingly asking about Alpha Transparencies in PNG’s. Let me put this to rest by saying that at this stage we have no plans to implement alpha transparency in PNG’s.
Perhaps you need to blog this : everyone who *isn’t* reading this far down is sure to keep on repeatedly asking about it. Sure, it’s pity that you’re not supporting PNG transparency, but it’s positive that you’re committing either way and coming out with a clear & definite position.
Is CSS 3 a full recommendation, no. Will it be any time soon, no. But portions of CSS 3 are *ready* for implementation.
I’d like to see some CSS3 selectors, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements. That module is a Candidate Recommendation. At least to be on par with where other browsers are in their support.
At this point I’d be happy to have fixed CSS 1 and 2 in IE before even considering CSS 3. But other browsers are already implementing CSS3, and to imply that none of it is close to stable or ready to be implemented is false.
:target and the various structural psuedo-classses in particular are immensely useful.
In fact Microsoft’s own MSN for OS X already has impressive support for those stable portions of CSS3.
I have no expectations for CSS3, but one can hope, right?
Well, if you’ve got the time, you could always check what it is that breaks my site:
I believe it’s something to do with floating divs and a fixed div which doesn’t work. Also, the PNG at the top and bottom aren’t displayed correctlye. Thanks.
Given the amount of faked postings in this blog so far, I’m not at all convinced about Bruce’s supposed comment. I’ll wait till it’s confirmed elsewhere. Most previous discussion on the topic indicated the reason it wasn’t in IE6 was supporting legacy platforms, if IE7 is XP only that wouldn’t seem to be an issue any more.
I’m surprised someone hasn’t enabled registration by now, it’d make thing a whole lot easier.
Improved "standart" compliance are definitely important issues for the developpers but as i have no specific knowledge about it, i think the improvements have to be made also on the ease of browsing with simple things that have already been mentioned:
- tabbed browsing , it’s handy for ‘heavy’ browsing.
- integrated msn/google search in the tool bar
- the viewer tool of the msn bar is quite cool and it would be nice to be able to do a find on the current web page with it.
- msn tool bar is good(for hotmail/spaces/msn links) it should come by default with ie 7 (but can be disabled). Also It would be nice to have a link somewhere (may be on bottom of msn search results) to new microsoft products related to browsing.
- Also as IE is integrated into windows, we shouldn’t have to chose which pop up blocker to use.
Sorry to be off subject as not standart related but i haven’t seen a post yet from microsoft regarding the browsing experience.
You developers crack me up. Why do you still ask "why" (no standards, no PNG, …)?
Isn’t it abundantly obvious yet, that Microsoft will ONLY do what will (in their minds) secure their market dominance?
Microsoft doesn’t achieve market dominance by being INTER-operable and standards compliant; it does this by LOCKING OUT competitors, and on the internet, this means NOT beng standars compliant.
The sooner you developers turn your backs on IE the sooner you will be able to create awesome web pages with standards geared towards YOUR NEEDS and INTEROPERABILITY. The web would be FUN again!
Come on guys! It’s SOOO OBVIOUS!
dont lie: That was a really cool demo! At first I thought AWW – cool. Then when I read ‘No PNGs’ I thought HOW THE?
How about seperating IE from Windows. Wouldn’t you have far less security issues do deal with?
carter: People using the strict doctype usually know what they’re doing (well, more or less anyway) and will know what to do to fix their pages. Hopefully, fixing the pages for IE7 strict mode will mean removing the IE6 hacks.
Why is everyone telling him to support everything that is already supported, future proof this browser, CSS3!
All of the CSS1 and CSS2 requests should already have been taken care of as well as standard W3C conformations.
Who do I believe?
Bruce or Chris?
I will GLADLY spend 3+ hours removing the numerous ie6 hacks from my pages (Oh dear, come to think of it, give me a full day :D) if/when CSS 1 / 2.1 gets fixed/implemented.
As mentioned quite often, but not enough, here is my wishlist.
CSS 1, 100% complance
CSS 2.1 implemented, 100% compliance
HTML 4.01, yaddayaddayadda
PNG ALPHA LEVELS, Oh my!
Now, with the top 4 out of the way, here’s some nice stuff for later maybe?
XHTML 1.0, 1.1 and preliminary 2.0
MathML 2.0
JPEG2000
JavaScript 2.0
HTTP 1.1
XForms 1.0
Oh my!
Well then, get to work…
Barrett: see "dont lie’s" post.
Good grief!
Chris, Bruce, Dave, whomever; shut down this thread until you can a registration system in… I’m all for conversing, but we can’t even tell when one of you is actually replying here!
A few things I’d like to see, some of which have been mentioned before:
- Full PNG alpha transparency
- position: fixed
- width meaning *width*, not min-width
- min-width and max-width
No HTML/WYSIWYG and no registration = failed blog
in order of (personal) importancy
* CSS1 correct implemented – really would like to spend time developing new stuff then creating workarounds for allot of IE bugs! Time is money and the amount of time I must spent on these workarounds… .
* a correct implementation of CCS2 – do it right this time!
* better PNG transparancy support
* SVG – would really be nice!!!
* better DOM support!
* XHTML 1.1
* XForms,XSLT,…
They’ve been mentioned before, but I’ll put my ones in:
- PNG Transparency
- :hover on all elements
- problems with the universal selector (*)
- min-width & max-width
I appreciate the time you’ve all taken to keep up this blog and look forward to IE7 being up to scratch with the other, more current, products out there.
Those were faked comments. I’ll delete them, associated posts, clean things up, and turn on comment moderation. Joy.
Let me make a post for you regular readers:
We will NEVER make feature announcements in the blog comments, nor will we make stunning announcements, etc.
If you ever read a blog comment that says it from me, Dave, Chris, Dean, etc. that makes you say "wow, they’re finally admitting / announcing / denying" whatever you’re amazed by, it’s a fake post.
Don’t fall for it.
I have no idea what the heck is CSS that you guys are talking about but I’m sure It’ll help to improve IE and its "standards" in the near future.
I just want to say that IE is the BEST browser ever. You guys have done a really good job :-p
I’ve tried Opera, such a useless browser it was. It just kept crashing with no obvious reason and some web page didn’t display correctly.
FireFox was even worse, it was even ridiculous. The thing had a poor user interface, poor functionality, poor usability.
In my opinion, only one good thing about firefox is that it was OVERRATED. I just couldn’t see why people said negative things about IE and rushed off for Firefox.
Well, IE could have done better, here is some "standards" i want to see:
‘Download Manager’ – Every browser else on earth already had it
EASY Internet Security Configurations for ‘the rest of us’
Possibility to manage cookies, pop ups, plug-in, etc. EASILY
Favorites Manager!!
If possible, Please do make a plugin that integrates IE with MSN Hotmail/Messenger without forcing us to install an MSN Toolbar.
I don’t hope to see all these features but it would be nice if you guys could debut them within IE7.
Well, I can’t think of anything else.
You guys are so cool to have made such a nice browser, Cheers!!
I just wanted to say thanks for asking the question. It gives me some hope that IE7 will see some improved standards compliance.
My top concerns have been mentioned many times before (but just in case you’re counting):
CSS 2.1
xhtml 1.0
ignore/allow the xml prolog on xhtml pages
I’m really hoping you manage to do a great job correctly supporting the W3C standards. Of course I also hope that no one browser keeps more than 60% of the market, because I think that having a monopoly browser has been really bad for the user, and I’m really happy to see Firefox gaining, as it is forcing you (MS) to finally improve IE.
Good Luck, and I look forward to hearing what is actually planned to make it into IE7 as soon as you can let us know.
I would like to see a follow-up blog entry that summarizes what you think the developer community most wants, based the variouse comments here and elsewhere posted as a response.
just a regular user:
Seriously, was that a joke? First you complain about the newer browsers having poor functionality, usability and interface – and then you go on asking that the IE team fix exactly those things – and in one swoop you’re basically admitting they are better in Opera and Firefox.
I’m a web developer for a large fortune 500 corporation, and am glad that decided that Microsoft has finally decided to update IE. So here are my requirements.
1. Comparible web standards support on par with Safari and Firefox. Today I spent 30 minutes developing a site that rendered exactly as intended on Safari and Firefox. I then had to spend I further 3 hours working around around various IE bugs and lack of support for CSS properties. We have to support both these browsers, and we use open web standards to do so. Open standards save my company time and money when building web sites. Please ensure that IE 7 supports these.
2. Support for PNG images with alpha transparency. Without having to use a proprietry extension.
Ok. First off, anyone who knows my history will know that I have more reason to be on the anti-Microsoft side than *any* of you.
Having said that, I think most of the negative comments show a REAL lack of comprehension about the real world.
Point #1: Development is HARD. Development takes time. The larger your install base, the less flexibile you can be. Statements like "any decent programmer can do it" which implies that they aren’t decent programmers are insulting to the team working on it.
Point #2: While MSFT is huge and has tons of cash and developers, that doesn’t mean the team reading this blog is infinite and can accomplish everything. They need to prioritize. You can critisize MSFT all you want for de-prioritizing IE but complaining to the people who are working on it isn’t the way to go. Don’t you think they realize this already and would like 100s more programmers to help them? (We’ll maybe not 100s but you can always use more). Why is it de-prioritzied? Hmm. Let’s see. It makes no money. Has a 95% market share. No real competition. Don’t argue Mozilla to me. 5% isn’t competition. 5% is Apple. It is a way to avoid anti-trust. So what would you do? Remeber that you need to answer to your stock holders…Now some of the means employed to get to a 95% share is another issue…but I will resist the digression.
Point #3: Standards are a well and good but I laugh at the people who think that they are dogma.. Netscape (and later Microsoft) provided the innovation and drive. As much as possible they worked with the standards groups. I have almost always been on the non-standards side of the argument with Chris so hearing him being slammed by you guys is deliciously ironic but not at all fair to him…
-Jon
@Just a regular user:
Use Firefox and you’ll get (almost) all of the features you request and that IE lacks about.
Bruce, how do we know that you are the real deal?
The world depends in many ways on IE. Technical information, personal communications and buying things…
Developers really want some tools they have heard about.
Innovative ideas they haven’t thought about are even more important.
Microsoft can gain commercially from IE and do great public service by making it easier to improve the web.
Bruce, why don’t you guys make a blog article about PNG alpha transparency.
Could "border-style: 1px dotted #CCCCCC;" actually be a grey dotted border instead of grey dashed border? Thanks.
From a user of different Internet browsers (not by choice)
Now I have not read any of the above, but I’m sure if I scan the page for IE, Netscape, Opera or Firefox etc there will only be a lot b******g.
Of course I think its great you want to improve IE and I realise you want to have a better browser than the competition and have better ratings too, etc. Still it is better late then never that you have asked, but I still think it should be you who should help the programmers and designers; and not them helping you.
The way I see it is you (all browser makers) should be helping the programmers to do their job and make Internet development easier and the Internet a friendly and easier place to explore. There should not be a problem building a website that works on all Browsers after an agreed date, but it is absurd when programmer / designers have to use [FOR EXAMPLE] IE 4, 5, 5.5, 6, 7 + and Netscape 4. *, 5, 6, 7 + and FireFox .9, 1 + and Opera 5, 6, etc merely to test something, and all because all you boys want to be better than anyone else.
Have you forgotten that is the user who keeps you in business? Remember the story about the Goose who laid the Gold egg. If you try to take it all you will loose (it all).
What would be a better idea is for you to discuss and agree with all the other browser makers what standards you are going to use and that all of you use exactly the same standards, and update at agreed times with agreed updated standards. Even children can do this, so what is the problem.
What you are doing now is asking people to promote IE and criticise other browsers or vice versa in a subtle way. This will always be a no win situation.
The Internet is never going to grow up if stand behind the idea of multiple browsers – multiple Internet. If is clear to me that it should be one Internet and choose a Browser; much like one road and drive what you want.
Of course, this is not a new idea and I hear many of you sighing. You boys do not have so much to lose but users do.
Non, ce n’est pas un post
"Don’t argue Mozilla to me. 5% isn’t competition."
Well, judging from the latest developments, Microsoft doesn’t agree with you on that one.
Though I’m very pro-Firefox myself, I do not understand the comments people are making that this blog entry says nothing.
This bit is particularly significant I thought:
."
and is the first time we seem to have indication that the issue is being worked on, e.g.
"We will continue to improve our compliance"
It seems to me that the posting above is intelligent recognition of the problem that the IE team is having to address if it is working on improved standards support. Simply moving towards compliance with the specs isn’t enough when rendering engine is the most common one in use; many of the hacks which people are using to work round bugs in the rendering engine could easily break existing sites.
In other words, the IE team need to find solutions in each case where there is a CSS rendering bug which both respects the standards and doesn’t also break sites which have used CSS hacks to workaround the existing bugs. After all, IE6 is still going to be around for ages.
None of this is to excuse the manifold faults with the current engine, nor the lack of detail about what the standards crew within the IE team are actually doing. But I do think we need to recognise that they have an extremely difficult engineering problem to resolve here, albeit one created through their mistakes in the past.
It would presumably be of use to the standards bit of the IE team if people pointed out instances of CSS hack usage where a fully compliant IE would break an existing site, leaving the site owner with a quandry as to what to do next.
E.g. see
where Eric Meyer says:
."
That I think is what the posting above is discussing.
"I have almost always been on the non-standards side of the argument with Chris so hearing him being slammed by you guys is deliciously ironic but not at all fair to him… "
Am I the only one not to understand the logic in that sentence?
Peter,
I’m trying to say that using Avalon/XAML for web development makes things like CSS and XHTML seem unnecessary. I don’t know if Microsoft intends these technologies as replacements for XHTML/CSS or not. But, from what I’ve seen, they CAN be used for web site development and would give web developers much more flexibility than with the W3C recommendations.
Michael: "but I still think it should be you who should help the programmers and designers; and not them helping you."
That’s a very cynical way of seeing the situation. I would agree though that the IE team should have a fairly good picture of what in the way of rendering bugs needs fixing, seeing the number of ‘IE rendering bugs’ sites there are out there. Since they have asked us what we want though, we might as well point it out – it can’t do any harm.
Will there be a roadmap of future IE development. When web application become more important I’d like to see a roadmap.
What is Microsoft’s statement regarding future improvements, will IE7 be supplied with some sort of "windows update" functionality resulting in new functionality, improvements of standards when such gets available?
Why not make Mozilla Firefox the Windows default browser?
Non, ce n’est pas un post
just support the W3 standards….
> have almost always been on the non-standards side of the argument with Chris
Given what Chris posted above, I don’t think he’d agree with your claim that he’s on the "non-standards side of the argument" with you.
I forget to mention one, imo important point. If you have time left between those 1001 CSS questions, could you take a look at the garbage collectors so they detect broken circular references between the DOM and JS garbage collectors
Javascript enabled web application will grow, and grow hard, and so will memory leaks.
- Support all CSS2 selectors (<, >, +, etc).
- Support CSS2 lang selector.
- Support all CSS2 pseudo elements (:after, :before, etc).
- Support the text-shadow property so you’ll be ahead of Firefox.
- Support the content property.
- Briefly: Support CSS1 and CSS2 completely.
I think I shouldn’t say this, but: Keep Firefox as your example.
I’m waiting for this browser. I really am! Being a web designer, I’ve been using any alternative browser possible as long as I can remember. I admit IE has been my arch enemy all these years. It’s the only reason I haven’t been able to switch to Linux 100%, because that would have broken my websites.
But I’m really waiting for this. Sounds very good. If you keep your promises, this will increase your credibility a lot, Microsoft.
The next thing, of course, is to port this software to UNIX. Internet is an open and universal medium, accessible for everyone, so all the major internet software should be open source.
No, I mean it.
We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses…
Standards be deviled. I want a way to embed .NET applications into a webpage without suffering ActiveX!
Pleeease, pleeease support PNG alpha transparency without the need for any dirty hacks.
Table rendering could be improved quite a bit especially when dealing with complex nested tables and rowspan. I want 150px to mean 150px not what the browser feels like.
Also full CSS2 would be nice.
You know, anybody who thinks that it’s easy or simple to fully implement CSS2 probably hasn’t tried to read the entire CSS2 specification, recently.
And then think — not only does it all have to *work* the way the spec says, but it has to do so performantly, for a possible thousands of such elements on a page. To most home users (the consumers of IE), "performantly" means "within a second," as far as I know.
I will be very happy, though, when IE does have improved standards support. Even the standards support that is in IE6 is really pretty great, compared to IE 5.5. I develop my code in Gecko first (because it has great built-in tools for web developers), and it almost always also looks OK in IE when I go to check it.
-Max
How about planning to release 7.0, and later 7.5?
7.0 would include what is possible within the available timeframe, hopefully including full PNG, HTML 4.01, and CSS 2.1 support.
7.5 would add things which could not be ready for 7.0, but which were in great demand.
Planning for a 7.5 would ensure that further improvements to IE would not stop at 7.0, with no more improvements planned until the next version of Windows (Windows 2010?) I suspect that other designers would accept less that what they would consider ideal if they knew Microsoft was going to continue the process of improving IE, and not let IE go stagnant as happened with 6.0.
I didn’t read through all the comments, so don’t shoot me when it’s already in here:
and ofcourse the security (currently the only reason’s I’m using Firefox :-x)
but tabbed browsing would be nice
CSS
===============
position: fixed
:hover on all elements
:before on all elements
:after on all elements
:first-child on all elements that can have children
!important needs to override previous element
Rendering Issues
================
PNG Alpha Transparency
application/xhtml+xml MIME type support
Whitespace issues in XHTML with style lists
Here are some quotes from AFTER I explained why Microsoft will NOT make IE significantly more standards compliant:
" How about seperating IE from Windows."
"I just wanted to say thanks for asking the question. It gives me some hope that IE7 will see some improved standards compliance."
"I’m really hoping you manage to do a great job correctly supporting the W3C standards."
"am glad that […] Microsoft has finally decided to update IE. So here are my requirements. [standards, PNG transparency]"
"Why not make Mozilla Firefox the Windows default browser?"
"just support the W3 standards…."
"I’m waiting for this browser. I really am!"
"If you keep your promises…"
"port this software to UNIX"
Developers: One of us is living in an alternate universe, and I don’t think it’s me.
Have you even read/understood:
Particularly the section: "Enter the Web".
An excerpt:
"Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows."
If browsers became powerful, there would be little need for Windows and MS Office etc anymore. See!
.
Just stick to w3c standards. If something (xhtml,css) is supposed to work, ok. If it isn’t, great. Do no let ie (or whatever browser for that matter) fix it for us. That only encourages click-n-goers and wysiwyg so called designers. If I work in programming, I should write my code right instead of relying on 3rd. parties to make my work work.
And regarding features… stick to those useful for the user. Tabbed browsing and things like that. Propietary css and things like that just contribute to make our job harder.
Many posters are saying that ActiveX should be removed from IE7. AX is needed for Windows Update. You will lose access to WU if you remove AX.
For MSFT if you want to improve IE’s security:
1. Don’t remove ActiveX from IE7. Disable AX in all zones except Trusted Sites and add, piracy check, Windows Update and Office Update to that zone by default. DISABLE means DON’T PROMPT because newbies are stupid and always click "Yes" on security warnings.
2. Another feature is "Software channel permissions". It should be set to "High safety level" in all zones except Trusted Sites by default.
3. Disable "Install on demand" for 3rd party components by default.
4. Don’t allow running programs in IFRAME’s in zones other that Trusted Sites. Don’t even prompt for it, just don’t allow the program to run. Inline frames are meant to display INLINE CONTENT, not PROGRAMS.
5. Don’t allow downloaded executable/batch/script/registry files to be opened without saving (you already do it in Outlook Express but not in IE).
Hi, I was the person complaining about erroneous use of Alt-tags in IE. Alt-attributes are meant for accessibility, not to display a tooltip with clarifying text. The title-attribute is for that.
So a well-meaning person advised me to use *both* alt and title tag and I did. I’d rather have seen the issue dealt with adequately, but I thought… well I already did so money small efforts to account for IE’s bugs, why not 1 more.
Then I saw that the tooltip displayed in IE6 (6.0) STILL displayed the ALT-tag *instead* of the title tag!
Sometimes I think someone over at Microsoft has to be peeking behind the developers shoulders, mocking their feeble efforts to try and get (or do) something right.
"Even the standards support that is in IE6 is really pretty great, compared to IE 5.5."
Well, if thats the scale we’re using for comparison, Firefox and Opera are truly God-like.
Eli,
Replace Avalon/XAML by Macromedia flash and you will understand the bad step you made. Are you for a Microsoft ou Macromeda only web ?
"If browsers became powerful, there would be little need for Windows and MS Office etc anymore"
You think the rich functionality of say Access is ever going to be implemented in a client-server browser model?
"One of us is living in an alternate universe"
Yep, that’ll be you then.
Rich clients will always be important and they will always be OS dependent. They aren’t just going to go away because you’d quite like them too. In the future that might well mean rich clients on Linux, though I doubt it for a vast number of other reasons.
A very nice feature would be the preloading of images that are referenced in the css – preloading for pseudo-classes like :hover.
@ Eli :
XAML/Avalon should not be used for web developpment. It cannot replace XHTML & CSS. With XAML, you are bound to the windows platform. This is not the goal of the web. XHTML , combined with CSS, was designed to run everywhere : normal computers, mobile phone, text-only devices… which is impossible with XAML.
My biggest request has to be support for alpha PNG and even MNG.
MathML and SVG support would be cool, but I don’t think they are likely to happen. Other than that, just keep working through the standards that you have already started implementing and fixing implementation bugs.
Would you really prioritize getting this blog to validate as a work item for the IE team over working on actual IE issues like CSS support?
JC’s Blog » Helping the IE Team
Colin,
Hogwash on losing Windows Update. WU only needs to be retooled with the new browser. For instance, .NET could be incorporated in the browser and provide the same functionality for WU with none of the security issues. Just one of many possible solutions to this "problem".
It’s interesting that users of Visual Basic 6.0 are upset because Microsoft broke backward compatibility in Visual Basic .NET, while web developers are upset because Microsoft won’t break backwards compatibility in Internet Explorer.
In refusing to support css positioning, IE is solely responsible for the prevalence of non-accessible HTML on the web. The use of tables for layout, which is the worst access nightmare, is necessary for pages to be displayed according to designers’ wishes.
I too would like to see PNG support, and although I can understand why you may have not yet gotten around to implementing it, I don’t understand why you are refusing to improve it.
CSS2 is long overdue, in particular, the more complicated selectors and pseudoclasses. These are things that web developers working in IE cannot workaround, or if they can, it is by the dirtiest fudging – see Dean Edwards’ overcomplicated set of JScript files:
Having read many calls above for SVG, XForms and MathML support, I don’t see why these are needed, SVG rendering components are available from Corel and Adobe. XForms and MathML are handled in IE by formsPlayer and MathPlayer. These are just the components I have used, I know there are plenty more.
in the name of the lord! plz i pray for it every day, MAKE TABBED BROWSING!!!!!
If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m the type of web developer that is so concerned with touting standards compliance that I forget the web is about one thing: USER EXPERIENCE. I spend way to much time saying that my pages are xhtml compliant when all that really matters is clean coding and usability. Sure we all like standards, but I’m a standards whore. Its all I’ve got. My graphic design skills are sub par and with my only claim to fame being my ability to point out flaws in the standard and in a browsers ability to render them, I sit and complain. My inability to deliver a good user experience is not my fault but the fault of people like the IE team, woe is me.
I’ve worked on two projects now that don’t allow MSIE user-agents because it’s much less time-consuming to develop for browsers with standards support. I always add a substantial amount to any intranet development estimates that must support Internet Explorer.
Minimum things we’d want to consider IE7 support:
- PNG Alpha Transparency
- :hover on all elements
- bottom: 0px
- min/max-width
- position: fixed
Of course if IE7 has full, reliable CSS1 and CSS2.1 support, then we’d fully support it. For a complicated intranet web application, the cost of working around unexpected CSS quirks is often more than the cost of getting people to use Firefox instead.
Fix floats – 3px bugs in particular, also taking them out of the flow as per the spec. Make work. Implement partial transparency in png’s. Make it so div’s aren’t stretched to their content text height when there is no text inside.
P.S. Stuff fixing floats for IE7, patch IE6 for the float bugs tomorrow, and I might consider using it again, as you have at least done a decent job on the security front.
The obvious: catch up with Firefox, web standards-wise. As a corporate developer, a supposed target market, time and time again, I had to use hacks and work-arounds to get basic stuff working.
In a worst case scenario, you could add a "super strict mode" where IE behaves 100% standard compliant, or use Gecko for renderding
Have we come to resolution on the gecko issue?
I can understand the need for backward compatiblity with pages that already depend on the IE quirks that make IE so special.
I can also appreciate the difficulties in trying to improve on something that may break pages that depend on the old implementation.
So why not just freeze the current IE code and just start IE++ which would be a whole new web browser from the ground up that would only be a browser and not so tied into the OS? You make IE++ respect the developers DOCTYPE selection and if they coded the page wrong then that’s their fault — the browser shouldn’t try to work around it in quirk mode.
With IE++ you’d have a new rendering engine that you can start clean with and implent everything everyone is asking for without having to break any old web apps. If there’s not DOCTYPE specified or a less strict type is required, then the IE++ could just call the old IE component and run it through the IE++ container shell — otherwise strict DOCTYPE declariations would run through the new and improved IE++ renderer.
My geeky wishlist that doesn’t include CSS:
(*) XSLT parameter support on the URL line — I would LOVE to see better support for client side XSLT.
example:
should pass in a parameter to the XSL stylesheet associated to it called "start" with a value that equals "Dan"
(*) SVG support. I’ve used VML since it’s inception, wrote a tutorial about it, etc. At one time before SVG, it was the way to go, but now nobody cares at all. Abode makes a plugin, but probably 0.1% of users have it. Converting the VML code to SVG, even if flakey, would go a long way in validating vector graphics in the browser.
(*) Xforms (already mentioned)
(*) Better conditional comments — including variables such as isMAC
(*) Exposing speed of browser connection. Since IE 5.0 we’ve been able to tell LAN or Dialup, but that’s it. It would be excellent to be able to get statistics for the user’s connection so I can tell easily if I need to stream dialup video, 100k video, 300k video, etc. Today’s solutions involves having javascript to download 100s of K of gifs and measuring response time — that’s dumb, the browser already knows!
(*) Some way I can find out what the user’s cookie settings are without jumping through hoops. Maybe like:
if(cookies.thirdparty == enabled) { alert("wow! you have 3rd party cookied enabled"); }
Oh, I could come up with stuff all day but it’s time for a dev meeting.
…Rodney
IE 7.0 MUST fully supports the CSS specs and PNG transparency at the VERY least. After that is done it would be nice if Microsoft began developing the browser as a browser and not an extension of the Windows platform (I know, I know, I’ve read the comments over and over that it won’t happen). The ActiveX experiment failed, get rid of it now, and begin thinking about how you can turn IE into the browser leader by embracing all of the web and the platforms that use it instead of how you can shut the competition out.
Internet browsers should just browse, not act as a frontend for the OS.
Chris Wilson: "Would you really prioritize getting this blog to validate as a work item for the IE team over working on actual IE issues like CSS support?"
Somehow, I think that people might actually have a clue what you’re talking about had you not deleted my comment.
FURTHERMORE: Deleting my comment here, and then comming on over to my site to post your views is pretty hypocritical, don’cha think?
I’ll leave your comment on my site, since I actually allow dissenting opinions there.
I think you’ve done an admirable job given Microsoft’s scope. My suggestion would be to strive for full CSS2 support for IE7. And please, do not consider removing features like conditional comments or any existing extensions such as zoom or text-justify. They are invaluable in several different ways.
Good luck.
Al Sparber
I WAS a fan of IE… used it to make my websites for 7 years. But it’s getting clearer by the day that Microsoft is only updating their browser because they just realized that Firefox has a promising future. Milking is for cows, Bill. Time to retire.
The dream IE7 being fully compliant with the MOST up to date W3C recommendations, and the LEAST amount of "IE" only scripting vanished in 2001, when suddenly, someone said OMFG they haxor my shizzle.
Want to improve security? Get rid of defective products. FORGET backward compatibility. Let’s enter a NEW era of computing where we don’t have to "depend" on YESTERDAY’s crap to move ahead.
Wake up. IE7+CSS3+XHTML2.0 = Heaven.
IE7 + security = Firefox.
Buh Bye.
Dave, I deleted your post, not Chris.
It was over the line in terms of abusive tone and language, while offering little actual content.
Don’t release IE7 if you’re gonna fix some bugs but not others!
It’s enough we have three buggy browsers (5.0, 5.5, 6.0) we DONT need another one.
On the other hand, go ahead! Release another bad browser. It’ll help Firefox gain more users faster, which is the best thing that can happen.
css 2.1, css3, xhtml2 are not YET recommendations. Lets be practical instead of bit**in’. PNG transparency should be achievable. Collate what people want (I like the list at ) and see what you can implement well. I’d rather see 4 well implemented improvements than 10 buggy ones. Go for the suggestions with oemph.
Do I love IE – it’s ok.
Do I swear at IE when coding – of course I do.
BUT just do your best guys. It can’t be perfect. Break a leg and thanks for the effort.
And which part specifically was abusive? The part where I stated I was sick and tired of spending hours apon hours hacking IE?
The part where I stated I need to use a seperate stylesheet for each version of browser you create?
Please explain.
Please do something about the click lag in the AutoComplete combo boxes. If I start typing a user name, and 4 come up, and I click the 3rd one, there is about a 1/2 second delay before the value goes in the edit box. If, during that time, I move the mouse pointer to any other item in the list without even clicking, the other item will appear in the edit box.
> am hardly a troll. I provided my name and will stand by all my statements.
As for not having a clue about that timeframe, try googling "jon mittelhauser ncsa" and then get back to me.
The HTML 1.0 spec was formalized after TBL’s first browser but he wrote the HTML spec first. What the heck do you think we based the first Mosaic version on?
However, his browser was a demonstration of the spec and never designed as a product. It was used by less than a thousand people.
In particular, my example was inline images which were added by myself and the rest of the Mosaic team (including the Chris Wilson in question) much to the chagrin of the "standards" people who wanted to spend weeks/months discussing every idea. We prioritized adding cool features.
I realize now that my statement: "I have almost always been on the non-standards side of the argument with Chris so hearing him being slammed by you guys is deliciously ironic but not at all fair to him… " is difficult to parse. I should have said "I have almost always been on the non-standards side of the argument AGAINST Chris". I was saying that I argued with Chris and he was on the standards side and I was on the other. So to hear him be attacked is ironic but unfair since he is a strong standards believer.
-Jon
At IEBlog Chris Wilson the lead program manager for the web platform in IE writes on how Intenet Explorer 7 would follow CSS2 standards. "In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as…
As a web developer, I’d love to see:
PNG (without the thing that makes it look like your trying to put an ActiveX virsus on the users system. I just want a transparent PNG for crying out loud!)
CSS 2.1
A few special requests:
I’m tired of min-height hacks. I’d love support for that.
:hover on everything. Web forms look nice with it, but until now its been Firefox users only.
If you can toss in a little CSS3 it wouldn’t hurt anybody. Even if its like Firefox’s
"moz-border-radius:". Maybe a "ms-border-radius".
Talk is cheap.
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I’d really love to see Alpha PNG support.
AndyC: "You think the rich functionality of say Access is ever going to be implemented in a client-server browser model?"
Yes, in the near future (1-3 years). Not all, but many. Consider what most users use: text, calendar, maybe even a spreadsheet. That’s enough to significantly erode Microsoft’s dominance. I have no doubt that a *significant* portion of users and uses could be covered by web-based applications.
As an example, just take a look at MAB (1) using Firefox, and you’ll see the future of the web, the end of Microsoft’s dominance, and the reason why Microsoft will continue to ignore most of your pleas for better standards support.
(1)
If developers were to mobilize on these issues (put even slighly more emphasis on standards when talking to their clients/employers), this process would be accelerated dramatically.
I’ll just repeat Mike’s post as above as I’ve had issues with pretty much most of these items!
CSS
===============
position: fixed
:hover on all elements
:before on all elements
:after on all elements
:first-child on all elements that can have children
!important needs to override previous element
Rendering Issues
================
PNG Alpha Transparency (MUST have!)
application/xhtml+xml MIME type support
Whitespace issues in XHTML with style lists
CSS2 full support is also a must have. —
1,对CSS1、CSS2完全按W3C标准支持，解决现有的盒模型Bug、浮动Bug等；
2,如果上面这点做不到，至少做到3、４、５、６、７、８六点；
3,增加对max-width、min-width等的支持；
4,用户可以放大缩小网页（至少是其中的文字），即使用户CSS已经按像素指定；
5,a:hover的背景图片不要反复下载；
6,可以把:hover伪类添加到所有的标签上；
7,增加子对像选择器；
8,增加:first-child伪类和:before，:after伪对像。
9,增加对含有透明度的PNG支持；
> It was over the line in terms of abusive tone and language, while offering little actual content.
Something that perhaps might be hard to understand or sympathize with unless you’ve attempted cross-browser web development is the sheer amount of time that hacking and kludging around IE’s standards violations/non support soaks up, and the huge mountain of frustration this causes. Some tricky problems in development are fun, entertaining and challenging to solve: this is not one of them.
It’s a real challenge not to let that frustration taint posts here, especially when there’s still no committment to addressing the issue.
> However, his browser was a demonstration of the spec and never designed as a product. It was used by less than a thousand people.
Was it or was it not an implementation? Criticising him for shying away from implementing is more than a little unfair and misleading, wouldn’t you say, given that he wrote the first implementation?
> As for not having a clue about that timeframe, try googling "jon mittelhauser ncsa" and then get back to me.
A number of people have posted under various misleading names here. Since you criticise TBL for not doing exactly what he did in fact do, I see no reason to assume that you are who you say you are.
The leaked info on slashdot and microsoft-watch states that you are not sure about implementing CSS2. As a webdev who wants nothing more than to be able to create nice, accessible, cross-browser websites I am begging you on my bare knees – PLEASE don’t skip CSS2!
Huh? I never said he didn’t write a browser. In fact in my statement, I called him a developer. Here is my quote: "The web would never have existed in anything outside a lab had the people in charge of the standards (e.g. Tim B-L, etc) been the only developers. "
My statement is simply that he had a different mentality than we did. We were much more pragmatic.
My only other relevant statement was that TBL and others would often spend endless time debating a spec before ever trying to implement it. As a result, some of what was specified was basically impossible and other things were left very unanswered. Part of the problem with some of the early specs is that they were so ambiguous about the right way to handle stuff. I remember endless debates as to TABLE handling for example.
As for my identity, there is no real way to prove it… but when Chris returns from paternity leave, I am sure he will verify it if you really think somebody is trying to masquerade as an obscure early web guy…
-Jon
DaveP’s comment clearly violated the posting policy () in several ways. The most egregious paragraph was a personal attack on Chris and the team.
People have managed to make 3987 comments that didn’t get deleted. It may be hard, but it’s not impossible.
Mark’s blog » IE7 wishlist
Jrme Morlon dans le Journal du Net discute d’IE 7 et de ce qu’on peut en esprer en terme de support des standards du Web. Il prsente la pression exerce par le grignotage des parts de march d’IE par…
I’d like to point out that being able to run IE 7 alongside previous versions of IE is very important for developers who wish to test backward compatibility. It’s possible to do this with IE 6, but only due to help from within the web dev community itself. A Microsoft-supported way of making this work would be a big…
One thing I’d love to see (and a patch for IE6 would be awesome) – make XMLHttpRequest non-ActiveX. If clients have ActiveX turned off by default, then this becomes an ‘almost cross-browser feature’. This one little fix would make <a href="">AJAX</a> much easier to implement.
Fiery, I accidentally deleted the comment you just made (one too many checkboxes checked while deleting blogspam).
Feel free to repost it, although I’ll say in advance we’re not going to confirm or deny anything Mary Jo Foley just reported. Remember, we don’t announce features in the blog comments.
Moderation is still on because some jerk keeps thinking it’s funny to spam the blog.
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As all web designers know, Internet Explorer is the thorn in our collective flesh. Even with the dramatic improvements in IE7, it still finds ways to annoy. However, the nice chaps at Microsoft have gone some way to soothing our fevered brows.
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In an interesting post in the IE Blog, lead program manager Chris Wilson explains the current state of affairs in the touchy realm of "IE and standards support". It’s an interesting read, and he makes a few cogent points. He…
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After a long wait, the newest Internet Explorer version is out, IE 7 release ( Team blog entry with download link). Without a doubt the most interesting ‘feature’ — as far as us application developers are concerned — is…
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