Slashdot Mirror
New IE7 Information Announced
Brandon writes "Looks like the IE team is trying to catch up to some of the major OS browsers. They have finally added proper PNG support and have fixed numerous CSS bugs. The full post is on The Official IEBlog." From the post: "We're doing a lot more than this in IE7, of course, and we're really excited that the beta release is almost here - we're looking forward to the feedback when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to beta."
Instead of implementing a vendor-specific tag, why not support the proposed CSS3 border-radius property?
there's more than one way to do me.
Then I probably shouldn't tell you about Maxthon or any of the other IE wrappers that add tabs and retain all the ActiveX holes.
Internet explorer actually treats width and height as min-width and min-height. Very annoying if you don't want it, but you can use it like this:
select {
min-height: 100px;
_height: 100px;
}
IE will (mysteriously) ignore the underscore prefix and parse the second style, while compliant browsers only recognize the min-height style.
This shows that the important question is in fact not "how many CSS bugs will IE7 fix?" but "how many CSS bugs will IE7 keep?". These bugs are currently needed to make IE6 behave properly. If IE7 fixes the rendering bugs but keeps the parsing bugs, we'll have to figure out new bugs to update the IE6-only hacks with.
They may have solved the consistency problems, but the standards supports is in great part unimplemented. IE is still far behind its biggest competitors as can be seen easily by doing a quick comparison. The user might not care, but the developer does.
Anyone know more details about this test and what browsers do pass it (I'm guessing IE6 doesn't, I don't have it so can't test it)? I'm surprised Firefox didn't, not because I'm a fan boy or anything, but because I presumed Firefox was in accordance with most of the standards.
This is the test and this is what it should look like. Here's some info about how it works.
In this IE6 world a webdesigner cannot use transparent pngs.
This is not completely true. PNGs with 8-bit alpha channels render correctly. Google maps uses this trick to create the push pin drop shadow.
SYS 49152
Your assertion is misleading.
Firefox, Opera, Safari, and other "niche" browsers render PNGs correctly, with the use of the 8-bit alpha channel. IE6, on the other hand, ONLY recognizes boolean transparency in PNGs -- in other words, it treats them like GIFs. It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
not to be nitpicky, but they didn't exactly buy Spyglass. They licensed the code for IE for a percentage of sales revenue from it, plus a quarterly fee. Since they didn't sell IE seperately from Windows, that revnue stream ended up pretty dry for Spyglass. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass
It is possible to force IE5+ to recognize the full alpha channel, but only with the use of a Direct3D filter command.
It's better (well, worse, actually) than that. You can add a Direct3D filter command to display a transparent PNG on top of an image.
So, for example, an image with transparency in Firefox, Opera, and Safari is simply:
<img src="myTransparentImage.png">
To make IE work, you cannot simply add an attribute or anything simply like that. Because if you do, your transparent image will display behind the Direct3D filter applied over the image, without transparency. So instead you must use:
<img src="infamousTransparentGif.gif" style="width: 32px; height: 32px; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader (src='myTransparentImage.png');">
(Not sure if the above really works due to spaces added to make it format better, but you get the idea.)
Again, this means you can can't simply add the IE-specific "code" to make the image transparency work. Instead you must jump through hoops to get it to display as properly, since you can either make it work in IE (by displaying a completely transparent image with the PNG image draw over that) or work in other browsers. Ultimately, this means either using IE's conditional comments or a JavaScript based solution so that you give the right code to the right browser.
Usually with special code to catch when it's really Opera and not Opera pretending to be IE so you don't screw that up too...
Note that you must provide the width and height of the transparent image you want to display in Internet Explorer, otherwise IE will scale it to whatever size the transparent image you use underneath. Plus, strictly speaking, the above <img> tags aren't HTML compliant, because I left out the ALT attributes.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Microsoft vs. the world? This should be interesting.
Will win what exactly? Customers win only when they have choice, not when there is one choice. Redundancy is what kept life going against all odds to this point, and now you're claiming having only one gateway, for yourself as a customer, to view the interweb from is a good thing?
I've been called a zealot or what have you before, but I just don't understand this mentality. At the very least it sounds childish. Here's what I basically picture...
For a significant part of their lives, the majority of the population that frequents sites like /. have relied on their parents for their needs. While this, in itself, is natural, the outside world does not mirror that process. To optimize, as we grow up we create the networks of friends of various statuses so that, ideally, we'll be able to rely on them throughout our lives.
Fundamentally, this is our environment today. It's engraved in us since birth, and it is part of who we are as a result. This creates a very different mental playing field. The very same playing field that corporations invest "R & D" in. The very same playing field where you watch the latest commercial of the newest chick with the biggest breasts, on the biggest car, with the phatest rims..... *ahem*. (Wow... that was so not why I coughed... weird.)
This is very recent. Before the last century, only a minority could actually afford to live like this. Parents were the most influential, sure, but people relied many others very early in their lives, and learned how to coexist in a very different social structure than that we have today.
To top it off, we have the big dogs, for which there are *no alternatives elsewhere. And they will "parent" themselves into population's lives. Creating a sort of "vision", they have us, by the masses, invest in their cause.
*There are, but you have to look for them. A task especially made more difficult by the big dogs.
I don't know about you, to me, this doesn't look sustainable. Frankly, I don't think that this is reality. So why childish? Because of the way we used to mature. Because of how we created our networks before. Today, it's simply a bombardment of messages catered to hit a nerve with the time frame where trust and love were more natural and given. So it is preferable, to various influential entities, to suspend the full human potential for maturation.
Might *seem minor, but just today, I've seen a national geographic. It was a statement about the environment (obviously). But more specifically, global warming. Now we both know that there are intense climate changes taking place as we speak. The cause: the global climate has gone up by 1 degree Celsius in the past 100 years due to carbon burning (mostly), and other miscellaneous causes.
*<tinfoil value="hat">Do you know who your "observers" are?</tinfoil>