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None of the browser completely pass it, but Safari and Firefox are making progress. Right now, Safari's support is best, with firefox in 2nd place and Opera a bit further back in 3rd; Internet Explorer is so broken you can't even recognize the smiley face. There's a post on Dean Edward's blog that has been tracking progress.

Microsoft has a team of crack developers, and nearly unlimited resources at its disposal.

Umm... no. The fact is, the current Internet Explorer 7 developers were pulled off other teams after years away from the codebase, and the simple fact of software engineering is you can't add manpower to a late project without making it later. A baby takes nine months to be delivered, no matter how many women help.

Dean Edwards says this much more eloquently.

In any case, if you don't want to think much about IE-only CSS hacks, you can always use "ie7" javascript, then only those who disable javascript in IE will look fugly.

Just for interest, anyone using IE who wants to see what that page should look like can view it at http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/compatibility/complex spiral/demo.html. It is the same page, but using Dean Edwards 'IE7' which is a set of behaviours for IE to improve its compatability.

here is a set of css/javascript files that fix many of the css bugs in IE6.

Not only has CSS 2.1 been out for a year (and CSS 2 for 7 years)... but Dean Edwards has been steadily shoring up CSS support with his IE7 javascript extension for over a year now.

I can't understand why MS might have trouble at least doing work that a single individual working for free in his spare time is apparently able to accomplish.

CSS2's primary flaw (and really the only thing that gives me the red ass) is how it handles the box model. IE's nonstandard method is just plain better, ESPECIALLY when working with liquid layouts. (And before anyone gets on my case, my browser of choice is Konq, so blow me.)

It works like this, in CSS when you create a div and give it a width/height of 100px, a border of 2px and padding of 10px you get a box that's actually 124px wide since padding and border are calculated on top of width. In standard CSS2 "width" applies to the width of content and not to the box as a whole. In IE width is the total width.

Standard CSS2 becomes really annoying when you want, say, multiple columns set at a liquid width with padding and borders. If you want two columns at 50% (not a good idea for web design anyway, but a simple example) there's no good way to do it in CSS2 if you want to give the divs padding or a border of any kind. (I don't consider container divs a "good way".) Give them 2px borders and suddenly their width is 50% + 2px which breaks the layout. No one doing design thinks in terms of content width. We think in terms of total width. (Unless you've worked with CSS for a while, then your brain becomes miswired.) In IE you can use 50% and then go ahead and add padding and borders and life is peachy and there's no need for any container divs or other annoying workarounds.

In theory, CSS3 will let you define which method you want to use for boxes in a stylesheet. So by about 2010 none of this will be an issue anyway. *sigh*

Honestly, I like CSS a lot. The box model is my only real beef with it. Most of the other issues I have aren't with CSS but with the differing implimentations.

Seriously, if IE would just support fucking selectors ( > and + ), a few more of the pseudo classes (:active), pseudo elements (:before, :after) and attribute selectors ([type="text"]) I'd be happy! The selectors REALLY HELP keep things contextual and reduce the need to use classes for very much. And while I'm whining let me include... GET YOUR FUCKING PNG SUPPORT WORKING YOU MONOPOLISTIC COCKSUCKERS!

Ahhh...

Also, any developers interested in having some fun with getting IE to work in a standards compliant way, take a look at this:

http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

CSS 2.0 (or even 2.1) being *so* unbelievably tough to implement is probably the reason why no one managed to create IE5.x and IE6 CSS "patches"...

oh wait, it's been done, and with only Javascript

Rewrite large parts of the browser, yeah, right...

I use this. Though, it's not a "plugin", it works quite well.

If they really want to win the browser wars, why don't they jump the gun on the Firefox/Mozilla crew and implement full CSS3 spec support as well as CSS2.1?

If they don't, and as it seems, web developers get tired of having to write code just for the IE family of browsers (I know that I am, and just use IE7 right now to get it to play nice), how long do you really think that it'll be before you start to see a huge ammount of those "Get Firefox" buttons on the bottom of even some of the major websites?

Because web applications threaten microsoft. That's why the things which are broken are broken: position, complex display, complex layout. If you use the set of javascripts called IE7 (god, I hate that name, but they're really good scripts) you find that in fact IE7 has all of the support it needs for the various missing things. IE6 could in fact be made into a standards compliant browser by injecting a few hundred lines of JavaScript.

Microsoft just doesn't want to.

Now, without putting on your tin foil hat, take a look at the specific things which are missing. Take a look at the things which are broken. Ask yourself, "if those things worked and were portable, how close could one get to the kind of interface a person expects for an application?"

They're not going to fix the box model bugs. They're going to polish them up just enough to get good PR, but leave them broken enough to screw with application development. They won't touch the problems with positioning, the width bugs, the bugs with auto, the bugs with -min and -max, et cetera. HTML is a much bigger threat to the application wagon circle than Java ever was. That's why their XSLT is still broken, even though they were the first to market; that's why ActiveX has the barriers it has to things that don't want to behave like DLLs; that's why their RFC2557 support in "web page archives" is so badly broken; it goes on and on.

They're going to take the parts of CSS2, and maybe even of 3, which in the long run don't matter, but which get naüve eyeballs. They'll put in text rotation, and transparent colors, and drop shadows, and stuff like that. They'll embrace all of the complex functionality for anything which is convenience-only but doesn't actually change things, and they'll get all of that 100% correct: the layered background support, the layered border support, stuff you can do right now with some extra <div>s.

But the things which really matter, which lead to the mammoth hacks you see in well developed CSS like in MediaWiki's MonoBook or at sites like TheNoodleIncident or PositionIsEverything in order to get something which should be trivial to work in just this one browser, which have been broken for years, which have been shown to be trivial to fix?

None of that will change.

They're going to implement 85% of CSS2. They're going to implement a big chunk of CSS3. Everything you'd see on geocities - the bastard children of <blink> and <marquee>, the things which nobody actually needs to threaten applications, the things which weirdos that try to explain songs to each other in blogs use to excess.

The things, in short, which would make someone shallow switch over CSS standards support.

They're going to turn their biggest weakness into their biggest strength. You can expect to see huge tracts of CSS2 and CSS3 supported. Just not the stuff which is already broken.

That stuff has to stay broken, until they can't wait any longer. That's what Avalon is about - they're scrambling to fold HTML into the UI experience so that by the time they have to give up the ghost and make IE do what it should have years ago, they can "make it a compelling new way to think about application interfaces."

They're making sure that nobody can beat their OS to the punch by breaking IE until they've had a chance to make their own first entry, and it's a damned good strategy. OSX' interface architecture is a mess; there are a billion different ways to do any one thing and none of them are as elegant as CSS is slowly becoming. The various Unices and Linuces don't have a dominant WM, and certainly don't have a dominant interface architecture; they won't organize in time to beat Avalon to the punch, which is only a few years away. XUL was a good try, and almost made it, but you have to have a mozilla install, and it's a giant hassle to use as a developer, so nobody's really taking advantage. Besides, until recen

Ummm.. it's standards complient XHTML and CSS 2, it should render ok if Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, whatever ships with the mac.

IE is probably picking the brail and screenreader or largefont CSS, which funnnly enough has large text, a small menu at the top and the main menu at the bottom.

If there's a setting in IE that lets you select the style sheet to apply main.css

Apart from that I may add IE7 to the site in an attempt to fix IE.

Why are you using IE if you have firefox?

Isn't it possible to write a plugin that chould shoehorn CSS2 support into IE7?

Yes., and it's possible to do it almost entirely in Javascript.

In the mean time, Dean Edwards gives us the gift.

Without a full commitment to CSS2, this in no way comes even _close_ to FF, even the FF from last year. Pathetic.

And when you take into account the vast amount of tab control you have in FF when you have 'Tabbrowser Extensions' installed, no way is IE going to approach that level of functionality.

Looks like there may still be a place for the 'real' IE7 . *sigh*

If they actually cared about developers, which they don't, they would make absolute, float, and hover work as expected and on arbitrary elements. For those of you who don't know of these issues, check out this for some nice examples of stuff IE can't handle. It's also work looking at the Zen Garden too.

Bad CSS support in Windows is the main reason I use IE7 (no, that's not from microsoft).

And about MS's product: I just hope they fix all their CSS issues and add support for CSS 3.

Someone had better come up with a new name for that IE7 project really fast....

This page is mentioned in an interview transcript at Microsoft and also on "Windows XP Central" and I quote:

RE: Firefox Users IE 7 is coming
In: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Other link
IE 7 Code!!!!!!!
http://dean.edwards.name/
i think these are real developers on early stages the work has begun i'm sure of that!

Not really sure what's going on here...but don't have time to dig in further right now.

You could just use IE7.

It speaks volumes when someone out in userland has to create a browser "fix" to render broken website code that its maintainers refuse to fix themselves.

IE7

i've only run into 3 websites that *REQUIRE* IE for windows (granded i havn't been looking hard either)

MLS - Multiple Listing Service for Real Estate. this website alone has prevented meny a Windows -> Mac switch for me alone, now multiply this acnticidote by 1000. but this one doesn't count because only realters are locked into the system, not the general public.

Seibol - a stupid, slow, and crapy internal system used at the techshop that i work for dealing assets, and time management. This system is probably the single biggest time waster at our shop. uhg. but this one doesn't count because only techs who work at the same company i work for are locked into the system, not the general public.

Pop Cap Games - some of the newer online games are activeX controls. it ticks me off because i got addicted to one of the activeX games while bored at school (and on windows) and i can't play at home because i refuse to use that pile of horse excreesion that Microsoft calls Internet Explorer.

So in reality, popcap are the only ones holding back the FireFox monopoly.

me on the other hand, i just developed a CSS based website that looks great in FireFox, and in Safari, and in Opera. but when i tried it in IE, i confirmed what everyone theorized - IE's CSS sucks the big one. i had to use PHP to spit out code that uses an entirely different stylesheed, and gifs rather than pngs - not to mention that i still needed IE7.

You might be interested in checking out "IE7", a CSS and JavaScript package that, when put on a page, pushes IE 5.5 and above into standards compliance. It ranks very high on my neat-hack list. See here: dean.edwards.name/IE7/

IE7 is already here

Never, they are evil.

By all means add a logo, or if you are evil, try this.

Actually, there's a much easier way. Browse Happy, formerly known as noIE, by the author of IE7.

I'd like to see if it's compatible with Dean Edwards' IE7 script. If so, it could almost be considered cross-browser compatible enough for general use.

Guess I'll have to look for a mirror...

I've wondered about this also. Check out Dean Edward's stuff. He's created a nice Javascript library that "modifies" IE behaviour so that most of its CSS rendering bugs and incompatibilities disappear. Very cool work. Why can't Microsoft do it?

> The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.

A possible temporary solution is this one. On the long-term, I suggest sacrificing goats until the MSIE team makes a new, improved release. They've recently resurfaced, so maybe they're alive and coding on it, who knows :-)

• CSS Wiki! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Centering advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Fix crappy MSIE support! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• tips, tricks and good practice techniques! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Box model Illustrated! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• links collection! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Tutorials, Demos, and Hacks! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices Crib Sheet! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Best Practices! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Holly Hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• 3 pixel hack! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Firefox webdev plugin! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Mozilla CSS editor! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Debugging Advice! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Page Building Process! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• selectutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Lists

• listamatic 2 (nested lists)! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listamatic! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• listutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• Piped List! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Floats

• floatutorial! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• float-theory! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Filtering

• Explorer! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• safari filtering! - + - this is extra copy so this would post
• filters! - + - this is extra copy so this would post

Type Issues

IE7

It's still alpha software, but it works pretty well in my testing.

I suspect that most of the downloads were made by the existing Firefox users who wanted to upgrade to the new version.

What we need is some way to get 1,000,000 new Firefox users and increase Firefox's numbers at the expense of MSIE.

This will encourage (or perhaps even force) shoddy web designers to design more standards-compliant sites and make life a lot easier for designers who already do. If only IE7 supported the Mac version of MSIE...

Oh well. We didn't pay for it anyway, so we shouldn't care too much about security.

We'll fix it ourselves.

Oh, there's no regression testing. Who cares? We'll do that ourselves.

But once you start writing a check, you now have demands, and rightfully so.

I don't write web sites for a living, so I may be off base here, but recently I've had better luck using a standards compliant browser (Mozilla) for most of my development. When it works there, you know it's probably going to work in Opera, Safari, etc. A surprising amount of hacking it to IE can be automated using things like http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ (IE7) and other free tools.

YMMV.

You can actually duplicate this behaviour (and many other missing features) using IE's horrid expression() syntax.

And you can leave the dirty work to IE7.

According these people, Microsoft already open source the next IE7 browser and leak the source code as well.

His excellent work fixes a _lot_ of shortcomings of IE before 7 to make it more standards compliant. Including all kinds of CSS selectors etc. and even PNG Alpha support. dean.edwards.name/IE7

Some guy named Dean Edwards coded some JavaScript and did some CSS hacks to make IE6 "compliant". Developers just have to link a css stylesheet to make it work. Examples on http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/compatibility/ (sure, you'll have to see it in IE6 to see the difference).

Just wanted to stick this near the top: IE7 is already out.

Actually, the easiest 'fix' I can think of for MSIE would be for them to release an update that merely includes IE7.css as the default CSS file (read before it reads any site's CSS file). That would fix the vast majority of CSS compliance problems (and PNG, too, if I recall correctly). They also need to pay Dean Edwards a million bucks for this thing, too - not even a rounding error to MS, really.

Here's how I do it:

Rule #1: Avoid floats unless absolutely necessary
Rule #2: Avoid nested floats...period
Rule #3: Side bars get position absolute and have width specified in ems
Rule #4: Main content area is given margins (or padding, depending on your needs) equal to the widths of the left and right content (in ems)
Rule #5: Make sure the content area is lower (z-index) than the sideboxes
Rule #6: Write for Mozilla/Opera/Safari first and port to IE later
Rule #7: Use IE7 to help port to IE instead of raw CSS hacks

Works for me.

I've used meyerwebs seashell idea to create a beautiful CSS site for a recent client only to find it broke in either IE6 or IE5.5 depending on which hack I used. After spending an few hours trying to get the design to function I made a hybrid tables/CSS design which took less time in total than trying to fix up the CSS hacks for IE. Maybe I'm just bitter.

I still feel that it takes a lot of extra time to get a CSS layout working properly in moz and IE and time is money.

Which CSS Zen Garden designs are you referring to? I was under the impression that IE compatibility was a requirement.

In addition, there are things that you can use to make IE act like a standards-compliant browser...or at least close enough to make complex layouts a lot easier. One of them that I like is IE7.

"[I]t is a *HUGE* PITA to get the same layout in MSIE for Windows as in Gecko, Opera and KHTML; you practically have to load a separate stylesheet for Win IE to get certain things done by its propertiary way."

Dean Edwards has created something called IE7, which was previously mentioned on Slashdot and goes a long way towards solving this problem.

It uses JavaScript IE "behaviors" to make IE5.0+ do a better job rendering CSS; it's sweet!

"[I]t is a *HUGE* PITA to get the same layout in MSIE for Windows as in Gecko, Opera and KHTML; you practically have to load a separate stylesheet for Win IE to get certain things done by its propertiary way."

Dean Edwards has created something called IE7, which was previously mentioned on Slashdot and goes a long way towards solving this problem.

It uses JavaScript IE "behaviors" to make IE5.0+ do a better job rendering CSS; it's sweet!

Check out IE7

If you are not aware of it, Dean Edwards, from everything I've read, has been leading a fantastic project to fix a number of CSS issues with Internet Explorer and doing a fantastic job. His solution is accomplished via a script you include in your markup.

See the previous slashdot story: Making IE Standards Compliant for more information.

Or better yet, http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ and fix more than just PNG alpha.

Why do they leave their CSS box model completely broken when it's obvious what needs fixing?

The box model has been fixed in IE6. Heck, that linked page looks better in IE6 than it does in Mozilla 1.7!

OTOH, this page doesn't render correctly in IE6 without serious hacking.

"Oh yeah, those are real specfic, that's why none of the browsers out there could agree on how exactly to interpret them."

Obviously it will never be perfect. Though, with the developer resources available to Microsoft, MSIE should actually be the most standards compliant browser ever. But they simply don't care. People want them to care and at least get the basics right. Why do they leave their CSS box model completely broken when it's obvious what needs fixing?

Just because no browser is bug free and there are tiny problems here and there with their standards support doesn't mean that Microsoft can at least try to be on the same level as the competition. We're not exactly talking about a tiny group of hackers coding away in their parents' garage here. It's Microsoft, with developer resources coming out of their ears.

So Microsoft should stop being asses and asking people to be "specific", because people have been very specific about what's broken for years now. They should start fixing it.

Dave Massy is either ignorant, incompetent and/or lazy, or he is completely evil and throws lies straight in our face. When he says that "the Internet Explorer team does exist and does care", does the fact that he hasn't even seen the many specific complaints about IE's standards support out there show that he is an incompetent fool, or is he a liar and just trying to blow off criticism with lame dodging attempts?

I don't know which is worse, but this guy is in a management position, and he's either a liar or incompetent. Sure gives me a lot of confidence is IE's further development! Oh yeah...