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.

Comments

Well...

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Michael Cherry, senior analyst at Directions on Microsoft, said he believes the software giant's biggest focus will be on security issues with features and standards support taking a back seat.

I guess that's not THAT bad.. Sure it would be nice to have CSS2 support, but security seems to be the #1 thing everyone bitches about around here and is probably more important.

Then again, I can't really see why they don't do both...

Flawed logic

[wileynet]

We consider the standard to be flawed. So instead we will continue with our flawed support of the previous standard.

Wait till CSS2.1/3?

[critter_hunter]

What a load of crap! CSS3 builds up upon CSS2.1, and even though CSS2.1 is still a candidate recommendation, it's being pushed as the standard by the W3C (as evidenced by the fact they are linking to CSS 2.1 in the navigation menu of their CSS page)

Of course, some people are actually in favour of IE not supporting CSS any better than it currently does - with IE7 being unavailable on platforms older than XP, and any attempted improvement to CSS being likely to add more than it's share of CSS bugs, it would just make another browser developpers need to work around. The evil we know might just be better...

Re:So...

[tabkey12]

Has anyone ever justified these claims that CSS is a flawed standard? In slashdotters experience, is CSS flawed, and if so, how?

Re:Flawed Standard?

[nightski]

What. Just because their products have their own flaws means they should adopt all technologies that are flawed?

IE7 & Google

[tpengster]

Let's put two and two together:

• Google is gaining a huge foothold on the web. Alot of Google's new sites (gmail/maps/suggest) depend heavily on Javascript
• Microsoft decides to release a new version of IE

Perhaps the new microsoft motto will be "IE's not done till Google doesn't run"

This won't be a huge problem since Google can simply update their code. However, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of JS functionality that would be very useful to google either now or in the future is simply "missing" on IE7

There has been alot of talk of Google launching a new era of computing with the web as the OS. But Microsoft controls the web (through IE), and they won't allow the web to become a competitor to Windows.

Firefox rendering engine for ie

[acomj]

Someone should make a ie "plug in" that handdles ccs. We have a couple open rendering engines (geko/khtml)..

Could this be done?

Re:Why I hate developing webpages...

[earthbound kid]

Since IE doesn't support CSS 2, it's really easy to slap a "Get Firefox!" tag at the bottom of a page, then use CSS 2 selectors to hide it from browsers that follow standards. That means that if IE7 actually does support standards, visitors will stop seeing a warning to switch browsers on my page. And why not? If IE actually could render a page correctly, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. Until then, I'm keeping an FF logo on the bottom of the page and hiding it with CSS 2:

http://deadhobosociety.com/wiki/

Not necessarily a policy

[fm6]

I think maybe we're stuck on the assumption that Microsoft is out to force its own technology on us, when they don't actually have that much control over events. The last time we talked about IE7, I made the assertion that CSS2 support was technically trivial. One guy came back with an interesting and thoughtful post pointing out the problems with IEs rendering engines and how proper CSS support would break a lot of web pages.

People tend to assume that every Microsoft action is part of some evil master plan. The truth is that they're stumbling around in the dark a lot. The software development effort is conspicuously out of control, and many of their projects are a total mess.

Re:time to spend some karma

[drew]

if by "adheres quite reasonably" you mean "enough errors on the main page that the w3c validator gave up and stopped counting after the first 50", then yes, slashdot adheres quite reasonably to HTML 3.2.

MS Moving Away from Browser-Based Applications

[eDavidLu]

The real reason why Microsoft does not fully embrace W3C standards is because they want to move away from browser-based application. This is also the reason why they let IE development go into the tank.

In the browser-based application model, MS does not control the desktop. They have competitions from Firefox and Opera. More importantly, MS also does not control the server. They have competition not only from Apache, but also Google, Amazon, eBay, AOL, and anyone who publishes a web application.

Microsoft's aim is to control both ends of a network application. And the way they are going to do this is to replace HTTP web servers with IIS and Exchange Server and to replace web browsers with Outlook. The .NET platform is just a step towards that goal. If you accept IIS/Exchange and Outlook as a server/client network application platform, there is no need for W3C standards. It also eliminates any competition, or at least make the competition dependent on Microsoft technologies.

Therefore, any effort that Microsoft expends into making "the web" more usable, such as CSS compliance and updates to IE, only enhances the browser-based application model and hurts Microsoft in the long run.

Re:So...

[masklinn]

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...