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CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link
Ritalin16 writes "Many web developers may be disappointed to hear that Microsoft decided to hold off on full CSS2 support with IE 7.0. As said by Microsoft-Watch: '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.'" More commentary available from ZDNet. Generally related to the IE 7 Acid Test thrown down by Opera.
Host: Dave (Microsoft)
Q: ali : Will the next release have full CSS 2 and CSS 3 support?
A: Hi Ali, It's too early to make any commitments as we concentrate on implementing the features that make most sense to our customers. CSS2 is actually a flawed standard that nobody has full support for. CSS2.1 is currently in draft recommendation to fix this and we hope to improve out support there in the future.
And from the W3C's page on the subject:
CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML's "style" attribute and a new calculation of the 'clip' property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a "snapshot" of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably at the date of publication of the Recommendation.
So it looks like they are intending at least some form of growth in this direction. They did fix the box model problem with IE 6, so I'm inclined to take this statement at face value.
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
That's a common misconception. CSS has made that easy for seven years (display: table-cell), it's part of the CSS 2 specification.
The reason why nobody knows about it is because even though Safari, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Firefox, Omniweb, etc. implement it, Internet Explorer doesn't, which means it might as well not exist.
This is why everybody is so keen for Microsoft to implement CSS 2. Or CSS 2.1, which is CSS 2.0 with the more difficult parts taken out and a couple of proprietary Internet Explorer properties thrown in.
It's not "CSS making it hard", it's "CSS making it easy and Microsoft making it hard".
For most purposes, grouping selectors is more than enough. The example you gave is a bit odd, because CSS lets you do that easily:
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
No browser supports CSS2 in its entirety (only KHTML browsers supports text-shadow, for instance), but CSS2.1 is fully supported by Opera 7.5, and Mozilla supports about 99.9% of it (and the parts they don't support aren't really important - counters are nice but far from essential)
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
All W3C standards are heavily flawed.
You've read them all? And tried implementing them all? And written documents using them all? If not, then you aren't qualified to make such a statement.
Writing a reader for it is such a huge undertaking that not even the largest and most successful businesses manage to pull it off well then something has gone very wrong.
Blame the browser vendors. If they hadn't engaged in an arms race to build the most complex error workarounds, then it would be a much simpler matter to build a user-agent (that's the correct term for what you call "a reader").
The underlying problem is not that hard, it is just a continuos pie-in-the-sky standardization effort ripping everything invented at any point apart in the next revision
HTML, CSS, HTTP, ECMA-262 have all been incrementally improved while remaining backwards compatible. The core specifications that web browsers implement have not been "ripped apart" even once since their conception.
Don't believe me? Go ahead, write an HTML (as in 1.0) document and you'll find that web browsers understand it just fine. Talk HTTP 0.9 to Apache, and watch it respond just fine. Hell, you can link CSS 3 stylesheets with HTML 2.0 documents and have it work exactly as you would expect, even though HTML 2.0 predates CSS by years.
Make a presentation format that separates content from layout.
HTML describes the content of a document. CSS gives presentation.
Allow textual information with embedded images and external plugins/objects.
HTML does this.
Include some basic scripting
ECMA-262
some basic widgets (buttons, textfields, drop-down boxes).
HTML does this
See to that it is decently easy to screen-scrape, use with screen-readers
HTML does this
and is resolution independent
CSS gives you the option of writing resolution independent or resolution dependent stylesheets.
Does anyone really feel that this has to be so complex that one can't complete it in under 15 years
Funny, all of the above has been working in browsers for years.
one can't make it simple enough to actually make it possible for a hobbyist to implement a reader for?
Plenty of hobbyists have written browsers. The original WorldWideWeb browser was little more than a hobby project.
Sure the W3C has standards for a lot more, but that is part of the problem, the core is too huge.
I fail to see how much smaller it could get. HTML for content, CSS for presentation, HTTP to retrieve resources across a network, URIs for addresses, and ECMA-262 for client-side scripting.
By all means, please point out which one is unnecessary or too complex, because at the moment, you sound like just another W3C naysayer who doesn't know what he is talking about.
I'm not entirely sure this is what you are after, but did you realise you can combine classes?
.style1 {color: red;} .style2 {background-color: blue;} .style3 {border: 2px solid black;}
i.e.
<p class="style1">I Have style 1</p>
<p class="style1 style2>I have style1 and style2 combined</p>
<p class="style1 style3">I have style1 and style3</p>
<p class="style1 style2 style3">I have the lot!</p>