Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Compliant
ReadWriteWeb writes "Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE addresses the issue of whether IE7 is CSS and Web standards compliant. Last week a Slashdot post claimed that IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. But Chris Wilson says that isn't true and that standards improvements is a big part of IE7. He admits that there were a ton of bugs from IE6 that have caused web developers a lot of pain, but says that IE7 will address those and be standards compliant. He goes as far to say that IE7 supports Web standards even at the expense of more backwards compatibility."
In addition to trying to be standards compliant Microsoft is dancing as fast as they can copying and adding the features virtually all other browsers have had around for years now.
From the article, MS (Chris Wilson) spots their compliance progress somewhere between 50 and less than 90%: Tough question, in terms of stating that we really do fully support the CSS 2.1 spec, it's hard to tell because there is a bias to any analysis. We're certainly somewhere between those two... I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though...
Not sure where that puts them in terms of compliance compared to the other browsers, but I'm happy to stick with Firefox for many reasons, recommend anything but IE7 to anyone for many reasons, and probably stay that way. IE7 from Microsoft is looking like a little too little too late.
In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility. In parts of the interview, Chris talks about trying not to alienate IE6 users (his mother) with changes to the "standards" behavior making IE6 sites not work or work differently, while in other parts of the interview he discusses being compliant "at the expense of backwards compatibility".
I don't know what they are doing with that, I'm not sure they do either. They made that bed. Now they're sleeping in it.
I wonder if the browser will pass the Acid Test....
So... What's the big deal here? It should be easy enough to test the final IE 7 when it's released and then nail MS to the wall when it proves to be faulty (which you know it will be). MS will probably play their little game of 'let's support just enough to get by, but not so much that AJAX and CSS will cream us'. Still, there's not too much room to wiggle here. They either support the standards or they don't. Simple!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"I'll respect you in the morning."
"I won't *** in your mouth."
"I'll pull out in time."
"We're gonna make this the most secure OS ever!"
Even Bush knows, "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, not gonna happen."
Guaranteed, 100%, that IE7 will be less standards-compliant than either Firefox or Opera.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Then WTF is http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ ??
IE7 still has the pesky problem, even after all the patches and rewrites, of being Internet Explorer from Microsoft.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
MS doesn't deserve slack.
There's only one standards compliance test that Microsoft has ever aimed to pass and that's their own.
One major issue is that many sites do not render as nicely in IE7 as they do in IE6. This is going to be a headache for IT managers and marketing managers for quite some time...
and for the love of money, think of all the FrontPage sites...
-- $G
Microsoft changes Web Standards to comply with IE7.
The irony is, that whether you like it or not, when you control over 80% of the browser market, you are the standard. That they are willing(?) to try to accommodate other standards, is really a sop.
If they fix the bugs how can we continue using some bugs to get around other more critical bugs as we can do with IE6?!
Someone, or more likely several someones, will independantly enumerate every area of non-compliance that exists in MSIE7. (Has it been released yet? I haven't seen an installation for Linux yet... I have MSIE6 on my Linux laptop thanks to some very clever script writers: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html)
That said, I have read where even Firefox isn't yet 100% compliant. I'm usure of how much difficulty that causes web developers though. Actually, I don't know much of anything about the web except that I use Firefox pretty exclusively. If MSIE7 was made at least as compliant as Firefox, it would actually kinda bother me as it would give me a lot less leverage to keep my Firefox deployment where I work.
>we really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements. Ah, improvements - not different implementation. >And I think that not adding any proprietary features in was probably something that was a little >different from our previous releases. But we certainly spent a bunch of work trying to improve our >standards support. And no proprietary features added this time! Thank you Chris - this explains a lot...
accept no limits but time
Pigs are flying, .....
Kazan has the goose that laid the golden egg,
Bush admits to breaking the law
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Internet Explorer always had excellent standard compliance... of their own ones.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What a ridiculous, misleading title. Microsoft have claimed nothing of the sort. They've claimed improvements, which is true. In fact, the article quotes Chris Wilson as saying he thinks they've implemented over half of the CSS 2.1 specification, but not 90%. That's hardly insisting it is compliant, is it?
I'm definitely no Internet Explorer fan - I think Microsoft's efforts with Internet Explorer 7 have been abysmal. But this is a non-story. Everybody knows that Internet Explorer isn't compliant. Everybody who has been paying attention knows that there have been gradual but long-demanded improvements included in Internet Explorer 7.
Shame on you Taco for posting a story with such a dishonest, inflammatory headline. If this were a political website, the equivalent to what you just did would be a Democrat posting a story saying "Dubya eats babies!"
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Wilson, speaking on behalf of Microsoft, also alleged proof that evolution is wrong, the moon landings never happened, and that Elvis is alive, well, and shares a quaint cottage in Northern Idaho with Bigfoot and his cousin Yeti, visiting from Nepal.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
It's a shame we can't Mod the original article the way we can Mod the comments.
This one deserves a score of "+5 Funny".
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
I look forward to the day when web developers won't have to develop multiple versions for multiple browsers.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
We're trying to improve the world for web developers and when we looked at what people were saying they wanted us to do, there were a ton of bugs that were causing web developers a lot of pain, from IE6 - and we really wanted to nail those and the most requested features upfront.
This is the problem, old versions of ie weren't standards compliant, for whatever reason. So making IE7 compliant, means it will break the old pages. We will have to go back to checking not only whether it is netscape or ie5 (as in the old days, i am sure nobody still cares that much about netscape), but whether we are dealing with ie6 or ie7. This is the problem that you created Microsoft, and it is difficult to go back and change these things!
Salzorin insists that all the ladies love him!
true story.
In Soviet Russia these Soviet Russia jokes aren't considered the least bit amusing...
Unfortunately not so simple. As long as web developers keep targeting their sites towards IE, it's a de-facto standard, regardless of its actual standards compliance. There are far too many sites out there which are broken when used on other browsers, because they are designed to work with the braindead way that IE wants things to be.
As long as one browser has such an overwhelming amount of marketshare, there will always be the temptation for the developers of that browser to do things differently than anybody else, and developers will neglect standards in order to make their site look a little better / flashier / faster than the competition, when viewed on that browser, by (ab)using its idiosyncrasies.
Microsoft is particularly bad at this, and has a history of being a poor citizen with almost every product that they've made, but ultimately I think you'd have the same problem with any browser that had 90+% marketshare. Since no piece of software is perfect, even a browser designed to be standards-compliant that was used that heavily, would have bugs in its rendering/interpretation of pages, which developers would begin to target, at the expense of other browsers.
Part of the problem is the developers who sacrifice standards compatibility, but the bigger problem is just one of having a monoculture to begin with. I'd prefer that Firefox have 90% marketshare than IE, because FF has a better security and compliance record, but I'd prefer that four browsers each have 25% than any single one have more than that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Really, 50% compliant is 50% non-compliant.
If your project can't meet at least 75% of it's goals, it's a complete failure. Anything less than 90% compliance is pathetic.
To put it simply, it's ok to have bugs on some of the obscure parts of the specification, but as long as IE7 still fails on the routine every day uses of CSS, it's garbage.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
A slashdot post claimed last week that the previous week (so two weeks ago), a Paul Thurrott article called MS IE non compliant. This is just plain wrong, the Thurrott article is over a year old, and /. should probably apologise, regardless of the standards compliance or lack thereof of the latest MS browser offering.
My one windows machine (authentic windows, purchased and everything, from HP), fails when trying to install IE7 beta.
It passes the genuine disadvantage test, then b0rks for an unknown reason.
Firefox, on the other hand, is perfect, so I don't feel it matters much anyhow. I only tried to install IE7 out of curiosity
If IE7 is a separate program from the windowing system in Vista? or in the release for XP? cause if it's not then there won't be any more of a roadmap for updating compliance than there was for IE6.
When the entire OS depends on one standard and the entire internet needs another... well this is Microsoft not the W3C so which standard will win out in Windows?
This is the problem with tightly integrated solutions... you can't just update one component, you have to do them all at once due to dependencies.
They should have simply released IE using the GECKO rendering engine and added a bunch of MS crap on top in the form of plugins and a theme.... would have saved them a lot of money and after a little initial embarassment they would have been congratulated on making a GREAT business decision.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
If web standards were a popularity contest, Microsoft would never even have gotten their foot in the door!
Now as a decade ago, I design for Mozilla, fixing layouts to work in the shit-fest that was/is MSIE.
Did the interviewer have to remove his face from the interviewees crotch to ask him that question?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The emperor loved his new clothes too, that nobody else could see them was not his fault
No. (search for "acid" on that page)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
FTA: "One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure."
Their html editing control is crap crap crap. I'm talking about the control thats been used in Outlook 2003, MSIMN/Outlook Express etc, I assume the interviewee is too.
* It is very easy to get paragraphs that are indented to the right. Yet it can be absolutely impossible to remove the indentation and align the paragraph with the rest of the text in the email. I suspect it barfs when it has to deal with nested tables.
* Deleting some text or formatting can drastically alter the following paragraph.
* You can read in perfectly valid html then it refactors it into gibberish.
Anyway its absolutely effing hilarious that they think its a strong html editor control.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
(Granted, the best way to do it is to set up a broswer check and use a different CSS file for each browser. But when you have a tiny website, you don't really care to futz with it.)
This effectively means that when IE7 comes out, all the hacks made for IE6 will break, and many pages created by that "cousin in high school" will suddenly look like rubbish.
Of course, those that were made predominantly for FireFox and Opera will still continue to work unabated.
He's a spokesman for Microsoft, a company trying to move a product. What is he supposed to say? "No, our browser sucks. It's not standards-compliant in the least bit. Have you tried firefox?"
A corporation claims their product is better than it really is. Wow. I'm shocked.
Ride the skies
From Chris' Blog...
Last I heard IE7 does not fix the Expanding Box Bug?
This is a troublesome bug when you're populating DIV tags with generated data. You don't even have to be doing anything advanced.
Microsoft knows about the Position Is Everything Explorer bug list. I've seen IE engineers mention it on their blogs. So I don't buy the "we don't know of specific bugs" routine. And if he wants more concrete bug reports after that set, then theres the Comparison of Layout Engines page which goes through the CSS specs in detail. I'm sure Micrsoft has fixed a bunch of those since IE6, but there are outstanding issues in IE7.
Most software engineers would pay large sums of money to have that type of detail in bug reports. Microsoft is getting that for free, but he is complaining that he does not have solid cases.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Satan insists AntiChrist 50 - 90% like Jesus.... except better.
The fact is no browser is 100% complient. Even if all browsers could bost 90%+, web developers would still have to spend ages testing and modifying sites so they display uniformily in every browser The big problem is not the browsers, it's a standards body that's completely out of touch with developers and users. They feel that to make a web page, users should need to learn 3 different languages (at least), are constantly depreciating much used tags and clearly aren't working with the broswer coders enough to ensure consistant functionality across the various browsers. The browser coders are continually playing catch up with the creators of the supposed standards and because of the size and nature of microsoft and the large amount of interoperbility internet explorer has to maintian with windows and office programs, it's much harder for them to catch up. Microsoft are just examples of how stupid the situation with web standards are.
This is the key folks. So many corporate database products rely on IE as the rendering engine. If the backward compatibility is lost, most corporations' will see their Crystal Reports, and other SQL engines that use IE as their GUI/renderers will be broken. They will never allow that to happen. So they will sacrifice the standard compliance.
Of course they will claim their concern is the "not spoiling the user experience" of their old moms or breaking millions of websites. But the real concern is that all these products should continue to use IE as their rendering engine. Their hold on corporate desktops through MS-Office and IE is too dear and profitable for them to compromise.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The usual crap by slashdot editors...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
The good news is that Firefox is still gaining marketshare, and in certain areas it's pretty high up, too... and the users are starting to demand rightly-done websites.
So it's moving....
Ignore this signature. By order.
In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility.
Emphasis mine, changing the meaning a bit, but bear with me. If you read Chris Wilson's blog here, then you can see the following quote:
It's been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it's actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE.
Again, emphasis mine (not the caps, though, just the boldface). So - if it weren't for this Chris guy, CSS wouldn't even have been implemented in IE. If he's right, that says a lot about Microsoft. I tend to believe him here.
Artificial intelligence is a philosopher's stone of "arete" for the Web browser.
"We really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements." Translation: Our work on CSS and HTML is incomplete.
"In IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards." Translation: we are not committing to being compliant with Web standards.
"We certainly spent a bunch of work trying to improve our standards support." Translation: We're over budget on standards support.
"I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though." Translation: we're not compliant.
"Well as you saw I got a little frustrated with the Slashdot post." Translation: I can't point to factual inaccuracies in the Slashdot post, but I sure don't like the spin.
"The target for that was not just passing any one particular test." Translation: We don't pass that particular test.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'm sure that both of you who currently test against standards first will probably have something to say, so go ahead. Just remember the rest of the world probably isn't with you.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
This Microsoft insisting that they are standards compliant always reminds me of another time they insisted that they were compliant to some standard, and got completely embarassed:
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation
Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this
week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and
I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at
all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will
appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was
holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix
style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to
leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The
product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing
Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed
and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products
(like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not
well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room
and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their
choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that
are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should
be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very
compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in
the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and
should work quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a
bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the
MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now
Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one
of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM
lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable
confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality
collides with everyone elses?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The citizens are basically good, but the powers-that-be are the ones screwing it up. I can just picture all the red tape this dude has to go through...
Given
...." because they work. And the entire system uses the HTML code, so they won't have to code exceptions into the help pages/HTML controls/etc so that it works in IE7 specifically.
a) They have thousands of good programmers
b) IE is a *central* piece of necessary software to MS OS's
c) DirectX 10 is vista-only "because the model has changed"
d) They've had *years* to do this
Why can't they just make IE more standards-compliant than any other? They won't have to worry about backward compatability because the fixes and work-arounds will not be necessary. They won't have people coding "for IE7 unless IE6 or
Maybe they will no longer accept "It works fine in IE" as the gold standard anymore.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've tested both Beta 1 and Beta 2, and BOTH of them are RIDDLED with the same bugs that plagued IE6. These include the guillotine bug, where images inside floated elements simply "disappear" dynamically when you apply a chance to any filter effect on an element.
Basically what MS did was fail to adopt a large number of basic CSS rules (like inherit), fail to solve a bunch of known bugs, close or kill a bunch of workarounds FOR those bugs (which would have been logical and necessary if said bugs were actually fixed), and declare victory.
I want my money back.
-rt
None. Microsoft simply declares that "dark" is now the standard.
I guess it's good to be the king.
*waves goodbye to his good karma*
when you install the AHEM font six out of seven pass.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
What really gets me as a web developer is his "Standards? Define standards? We're just groping in the dark like everybody else." attitude. Safari, Opera and Firefox seem to be figuring it out okay. As a web developer, I can design a web page and have those three browsers look pretty much the same with only minor differences. Then I spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to hack it in IE.
I mean, what's so difficult about figuring out how compliant you are? Get a list of the CSS 2.1 spec and make a checklist out of it. "Child selectors, check. Pseudo selectors, check. Box model, check." Do the math - (IE7 CSS implementation/CSS spec)*100 = Percent compliant. Is it perfect? Probably not but it's a start for pete's sake.
Actually, I've given up wasting time on IE (including IE 7) and just run Dean Edward's IE7 script. It's just becoming less and less worth supporting IE down to the pixel. As web developers, we're tired and we've had enough. Don't expect us to jump for joy simply because you've begun making IE a little bit better toward standards. Nothing short of 90% compliance will be worthwhile. And if you get there, don't expect a big sloppy kiss from the web developer community either because it's been long overdue.
On the other hand, I welcome Microsoft's slide toward irrelevance and the inevitable renaissance of a non-microsoft controlled web. So...I guess keep up the good work Chris!
As long as the browser is installed by default on the majority desktop OS used by a majority of people that have no clue what difference it makes, or even no clue that an alternative exists, this will unfortunately be the case. The fact that MS had to de-integrate IE from the Windows core as a result of the Netscape lawsuit years ago did not do much to change their ways, as it still comes pre-installed on all windoze PC's. Given the hardware requirements of Vista, I foresee the problems caused by IE6 to stick around for many years to come, as people will be much more reluctant to upgrade to it (and thus to IE7). XP users will probably be upgrade automagically, but older systems will be out of luck since MS is not supporting them, and thus they are stuck with IE6.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
IE7 beta2 fails miserably on the Acid2 test, however Opera 9, Konqueror and the new Webkit for Safari do perfectly. Firefox does pretty well, with only a minor glitch. IE7 fixed the most embarassing IE CSS bugs, but didn't make major strides towards being more compliant. On the other hand, there are some major improvements in IE7, for instance no more need to have a shim frame to block controls from showing through other DIVs.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
I was one of the contribs for Gecko, between 1998 and 2000. I do NOT prefer Firefox to have a 90% share. That was not the goal of the project. The goal is to have a situation where there is a number of browsers, all with resonable share.
Thats the perfect situation. Keeps innovation, and helps standards adherance.
Have a nice day!
The Acid2 stuff is like the browser developer's version of mine's-bigger-than-yours-is. It's about bragging rights, and that's it.
Sure, it's a test of strict compliance with certain aspects of the W3C CSS specs. Speaking as a guy responsible for a web site, though, I care far more about whether IE7 supports everyday, often-useful aspects of W3C specs. Here are some examples that I do care about, all of which have directly affected my work on the site in recent weeks:
In terms of new features, I'd love for IE to support at least basic SVG, so auto-generated graphics could be available for the majority of my user base. I'd love for someone to drive through the proposed CSS3 border-radius property and friends, so we could drop all the image-based hacks once and for all. Again, these are practical considerations that would directly affect my ability to display visually attractive and informative content for my users.
On the other hand, do you know how many of the Acid2 non-compliance things are relevant to me? None, just like any other web developer who actually writes pages that follow W3C specs.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now, the reason that pages rendered in an "alternative browser" (translation: Firefox?) "look different" (translation: look the way those pages really designed -- recklessly and broken) is that it is "not a Microsoft product" (translation: it is standards-compliant, doesn't BSOD your computer when it hangs and doesn't execute every crap that it founds on the internet by default).
So, it is enough to say that IE7 is going to be Microsoft-compliant. Spit and stone the w3c standard in the eye, and then say: "we have a new standard!". The whole web will soon follow.
"... I think it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have an analysis of exactly where we are as a number with supporting or complying with CSS..."
Of course it's impossible. Because then you'd have to compare that number with other numbers provided for other browsers...
"IE7 is Standards Compliant"
"These aren't the droids you're looking for"
"You can go about your business"
If IE7 really indeed is compliant with CSS and WC3 standards, doesn't that suggest that those users who move to the new browser will now be incompatible with the webpages made with the older non-compliant IE browsers in mind?
Microsoft purposely tried to branch off the standards everyone else followed in the hopes that their large pre-installed base would in fact make the proprietary Microsoft standards ubiquitous. But what they've effectively done is distance themselves from a quickly growing number of users who refuse to play by their rules. I don't see how they can become compliant without alienating either their current users or instead their potential users.
Guys has anyone actually given any thought to the amount of work these people are putting into this project? All you can manage to do is rip M$ apart when in reality the IE7 guys are trying to do something about their browser. IE6 got released in what 01? and then afterwards DISBANDED the team. This means that everything that came out in the interviening time didn't even have someone to consider added it to IE. Yes there are other more standards compliant browsers out there, but they all had a constant stream of development whereas IE sat and got stale. Now the IE team is back together and trying its damnedest to get it back up to spec. They have done some unprecedented things with releasing the betas to the public and are doing this to get real CONSTRUCTIVE feedback to improve how the browser operates with the standards. Honestly a lot of you are saying a whole lot of things that really arn't fair to this team and certainly not to Mr. Wilson. You want particular things fixed be polite, be specific, maybe even offer possible solutions. Do not be a jerk to these people they are working hard just as you are and they get to read on these sites the pretty rough things about their company who while not always been the nice guy or been on the up and up has also done a lot of good things. And just remember IE7 is still in beta, betas are buggy, expect it to be so. If it didn't have bugs then it wouldn't be a beta now would it. I know that this is going to stir some of you up, but try for just a minute to think before you post, and at least try to be original in your insults if you feel the need to go that way.
The w3c could have avoided millions of man-years of developer pain by simply getting a little backbone and bullying browser providers that aren't supporting the standards (oh, yeah, they call them recommendations).
That, and perhaps some reference renderings of CSS, (X)HTML, etc. So that alternate interpretations of the standards are snuffed out well before web-developers have to code for them individually.
I'll believe it when I see them supporting SVG. Until then, it's a load of crap.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I definitely call bullshit on this one. IE7 totally breaks my site, which is very compliant standards-wise and works fine in just about every other browser. IE7 goes right into the bucket where I left IE6 laying, brought out only to test web sites (and now, apparently, to re-test previously fine websites when I have to fix them). Thanks, Microsoft!
"I am treated as evil by those who feel persecuted because they are not allowed to force me to believe as they do."
Pinky Dinky Doo
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
In other news....Microsoft changes Web Standards to comply with IE7.
Didn't you read the post? Microsoft improves standards to comply with IE7. Get it right.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
yeah right... it is not css compliant! or at least all the beat releases so far have not been! I hear the web devolpers bitch about this all time time.
The fact is that /. embarrassed itself last week by posting a year-old story by Thurott on IE7 beta 1's CSS compliance. That slashdot has refused to apologize for or even admit to this error in judgment speaks volumes regarding slashdot's credibility (lack thereof) regarding MS stories. But then, what do you expect from a site that uses childish Borg-Gates and Cracked-Windows icons for MS and Windows stories (while all other topics have editorial-free icons and/or the official logos of the companies involved)?
Here's an interesting and educational video on the improvements IE7 has made over IE6 wrt CSS support:
IE7's CSS support
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Only runs on Windows - check
apple-like icons - check
Tosses bs errors on competetitor sites - check
runs viruses quietly - check
ignores CSS specs MS doesn't use - check
what's the problem?
They'd just go buy one.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
IF he is being unfairly blamed, then he has my sympathy on that and that alone. But to turn around and say "hey, we ARE standards-compliant - give or take up to 50% on the standards I even know about" is not a way to win friends and influence people. If he lacks the time to even establish which parts of the specs are implemented, then he might be better spending his time on figuring that out -or- listening to those who have, rather than complaining that the reviews make him look bad.
He should also stop and bear in mind that since he himself states he does not know the actual level of compliance (he only thinks it is over 50%) then he has absolutely no grounds for complaining about other people's estimates. For that matter, the lack of knowledge on compliance would suggest that the browser is improperly tested. Standards compliance tests are not really optional, since they establish a list of well-defined behaviours for well-defined cases. At the very least, you want to be absolutely certain that those cases won't cause the browser to crash or go rogue. The only way to know this is to try them out. And if you're trying them out, you know which standards are met and by what amount.
Ergo, his uncertainty establishes firmly that testing and QA is somewhere between poor and non-existant, AND that Microsoft has no software with which to determine when the standards are met. His complaint of being a lone voice establishes firmly that these are not being fixed and never will be.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... laugh for about ten minutes after seeing the title on your feed reader? Seriously, I'm not joking. I vote for funniest article title of the year.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
But is it yet HTTP-compliant? Specifically, does IE 7 treat the Content-Type header provided by the server as authoritative as required by RFC 2616 Sectino 7.2.1?
.iso file and don't configure their website to treat *.iso as application/octet-stream and serve it as text/plain, but I hate even more that Internet Explorer will download the file to disk where all HTTP-compliant browsers will properly render the ISO file in the browser window as plain text, resulting in the server never being reconfigured to serve the file as the proper type because the person who set it up only tests with IE!
I'm sick of sites that, say, put up a Linux boot CD up as a
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It's from Softools, and is meant for Rabbit microcontrollers. It'll say stuff like. "blabla, assuming blaba".
I don't have the compiler here at hand, but it really assumes stuff about your code and will actually try to continue the compile because you forgot a semicolon, or braceclose or whatever.
The most horrible compiler I have ever used. bar none!!!
Bart
I'm sitting here listening to this nonsense about IE standards and how firefox is 'better'. Why specifically? I've designed several styles that work in both browsers and get tired of having to use --moz-* extensions to accomplish things that work in IE following the CSS2 spec. Mostly in the area of: display:-moz-inline-box; -moz-border-*-colors: Most CSS selectors don't appear to work much at all in either IE or FF which is pretty high on my list of CSS gripes. In my experience divergence from my read of the CSS2 spec is about the same for both browsers. I'm sure theres at least one pretty detailed comparision matrix out there somewhere.
(I can't get IE6's results, because you can't go backwards with IE versions -- don't ask me why)
Passed: 149
Failed: 115
-----------
Total: 254
(Caveat: Some of the tests are rather vague. All mistakes on my part were made in favor of the browser.)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Firefox should pass Acid2 sometime in 2007. Firefox 2 is using the same version of the rendering engine as Firefox 1.5, but work has already been done on the code that will eventually work its way into Firefox 3 (not to mention future versions of SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.)
Here's a good run-down of Acid2 status in major browsers. According to that, a "reflow" branch of Gecko alread passes the test, but the changes haven't been fed back into the trunk.
In short:
Safari: Passed
Konqueror: Passed
Opera: Passed
Firefox: Working on it, should be two releases away.
Internet Explorer: Ignoring it for now.
You should care very much what the browser does with invalid code. If a browser implements CSS2, anything new in CSS3 is going to be interpreted as invalid. Similarly, since each browser implements a different subset of the standards, you want to know exactly what will happen if you feed code that works in browser A to browser B. You don't want browser B to look at your @media print rule and decide to apply it to the screen anyway. IE4 actually did this if you put more than one rule in an @media section that it didn't recognize.
That's actually what Acid2 is trying to check: according to the standards, the browser is not supposed to try to compensate for bad code, it's supposed to ignore anything that's broken. If the browser tries to "make things right," it will fail Acid2. If it ignores it, as it's supposed to, it passes.
All that said, as Bogtha pointed out repeatedly, Acid2 tests a lot more than just how the browser handles invalid code.
You expect the W3C to provide clear, adequate documentation?
Please, they're a standards body. That's not in their mandate.
A standard is, by its nature, a "common ground", something that is supposedly the agreed basic form of something. And, well, depending on how you want to define "standard", the browser can very well be "standard compliant".
If you take the webpages-that-are as a standard, and not the (let's be honest here, quite artificial) requirements of the W3C, it's well within the limits of possibility that the IE7 is sufficiently close to standard. It does display "everything" correctly.
Webpages and browsers are deadlocked against each other in a need for compatibility. If your page doesn't look right with IE, it is not right. NO matter how conform you are with the standard. People will go to your page, see that it isn't displayed correctly with their IE and they will go, thinking you have no clue. Yes, you're W3C standard compliant, yes, you didn't do anything wrong, no, IE won't display it. Thus it is YOUR fault in the eyes of the user, because "everything else" works with the IE.
The real standard is made in the real world by real people using real webpages (well, as real as webpages get). Yes, it would be nice if standard would mean that people know about the W3C standards and that they blame the errors in the way their browser displays a fully standard compliant page on their faulty browser. Unfortunately, it works differently.
So if you define standard as "the way the vast majority of webpages on the net work", then the IE is by definition standards compliant. Webmasters all over the globe go out of their way to carter to the quirks and flaws of the IE.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Regain implies they might've gone so far as to earn it on equal terms of competition. I don't see MS dropping their monopolistic practices anytime soon, and by all means they seem to be getting worse. Whether or not IE7 is standards-compliant, I'm sure they'll make it a big part of Vista (whenever that thing does come out).
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
It has small red lines in float 0, and red boxes in height 3. All others pass.
"....adequate documentation? Please, they're a standards body...."
I hope you were joking because if they make standards and don't document adequately, then no wonder web browsers are going in every direction imaginable.
Praise Bob! :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Microsoft claims there's nothing wrong -- again. Just like in their antitrust suits, etc. Let the evidence speak, not the multibillion dollar machine with an agenda.
They lied through their teeth in court under oath, what makes anyone think this is trustworthy info? I think everyone here is smart enough not to believe it for a second until they see it.
When will people learn that IE is not a browser its your OS shell. when it becomes a browser then it might be complient. untill then dont hold your breath.
But you are not looking at your own "switching costs". What is the pricing power of any company selling anything? Typically a company cant sell something below cost and expect to thrive for long. That is the lower limit. What is the upper limit? That is determined by how much would it cost its clients to switch to a competing product.
For things like car tires and electric bulbs, the cost for a consumer to switch to a competing brand is practically zero and the price is determined by the cost of manufacturing, storing, distributing and the profit margins. Very traditional, old school economics.
For software, the cost of production is quite low especially when it is amortized over hundreds of millions of users. It is almost entirely determined by switching costs. If it will cost you 1 million dollars to switch out of company Xyz's product, Xyz can charge you 999,999$ and you will pay. If you are a smart businessman, you will strive hard to reduce your switching costs. Lower it is for you, lower will be your exposure to price gounging by your software vendors. Any time you develop a dependancy on a single vendor you are at that vendor's mercy.
Coming back to electric bulbs and car tires, how come the cost of switching to competing brand is so low? Precisely because of standards and standard compliance. SAE determines the dimensions and specifications of tires, not Firestone, Goodyear or Cooper or Yokohama. That is why switching costs are low. As long as MS "owns" the standards, you are at its mercy. You might not care about it. But be glad there are people who think far ahead.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My ass. Give me just a dime for every non-compliance I can find - I'll be riiiiich!
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
What is he trying to prove? Let's put this simple for everyone. No one that uses a non-windows OS will want to use IE(I hope). Almost no windows users will uninstall IE since that's possible but freakin' hard. It's there for some people and not there for others. It's not like he has to sell anything. All that is IE already comes ready to be pushed up the poor windows users face. Then why does it matter if IE is good or bad? Most people will still download FireFox before they configre updates when reformating with windows.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
More than 9 years ago, webstandards.org created this page
h tml
http://archive.webstandards.org/css/winie/inline.
solely to notify Microsoft that it was not complying and conforming to web standards. Still today, in MSIE 7 beta 3, Microsoft has failed to comply. 9 years! Chances are it will take Microsoft 10 years to be able to render the page correctly!
Agreed. I know a vendor with a BROKEN web page - requires IE to render properly. The reason it's broken? Not all the tags are terminated with . This is pretty brain-damaged, but they won't fix it, since it works well enough on IE.
I truly hope that IE7 breaks this really badly for them...
You know what you were told to do, and you know what you were told not to do. I think that meeting went something like...
Now, almost 2 years later, we get to see the results, and the numbers don't lie. Sorry, Chris, we know a mandated token effort when we see one.
Simply repeat as many times as necessary what you will benefit most from and people start to take it as fact. After all, who would have doubted that Enron was doing well when all the executives and experts just kept say so.
-Tim Louden
For each interacting standard, apply the above test program for typical permutations and corner-case permutations, such that all interacting standards are tested at least once in combination with another standard that it can interact with.
Sum up the totals and divide by the number of standards and standard interactions tested.
Divide the total compliance by the total instability to get the overall quality.
Calculate the theoretical values that would be obtained for a browser that met only the required elements of the specification, as a fraction, to get the compliance threshold value. Determine the ratio of the total compliance with the compliance threshold to get the baseline compliance.
The overall quality of the browser will tell you how reliable the browser is, when trying to follow the standards as defined. The baseline compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the obligations of the specification. The total compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the full specification.
It's a simple enough algorithm and is based on the usual testing procedures used by a million software engineers the world over. You test the typical, the corner-case and the error cases. In any specification, these cases are well-defined and should be easily tested.
Do these numbers mean anything? Yes. Due to the sheer volume of specifications out there, it is impossible to physically list every permutation that needs to be validated, but you CAN say what fraction of those permutations have been validated.
A superior method to this is to use an octal mask, where the value of each position represents the number of permutations (up to 7) that have been tested against a specific element, and each position represents one element. If you want to interpret half a screen of octal, go for it. It will give you more information, if you can process it, but will tell you less than the three suggested numbers will tell you unless you're prepared to do a lot of data crunching.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Complaint
;)
That would have been the greatest typo evar...
not to mention a truer assertion for M$ to make.
That glimpse of insight you just attained, it doesn't feel how you imagined it would feel, does it?
The captcha for this comment was: agonizes (I'm not kidding)
Just reminiscing, that's all.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
He admits that there were a ton of bugs from IE6 that have caused web developers a lot of pain, but says that IE7 will address those and be standards compliant.
This gets my vote for the Biggest Understatement of the Year out of Redmond.
Amusing you should comment that developers have been taking advantage of IE's "features". I've recently had the "pleasure" of inputting a lot of data into the new adcentre MS is offering, apart from the fact the whole interface sucks (it doesn't even accept xls files inspite of insisting you should upload them or CSV's - again these aren't handled correctly) it actually runs faster in firefox than IE.
I don't mean faster as in testing with a stop watch, I mean noticeably faster when using (ok the site is up and down like a yo yo at the moment but it's still early days yet).
If MS can't even code a site to work cross browser and make their own browser shine then that's quite a worrying thought since I'm primarily a web developer.
The real problem with IE7 fixing their past CSS problems is that many people have used the [if IE] hack and probably will neglect to change it to [if lt IE 7]. Their past hacks will be working against them in that case. In the production site I manage, making this change and testing in the IE7 beta yielded a correct user experience. Try it.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
...Fox announced that their news network was "Fair and Balanced".
MS doesnt need to follow w3c standards because they are rich enough to make their own standards.... active X(ploit) anyone?
Reality is....When something is 90 plus percent of the market, it is a standard all of its own. That may be "wrong" but it is the truth. I would love IE to fully support CSS standards so you can do a single mark-up/style-sheet that will work everywhere while being able to do cool tricks in CSS. MS may very well be arrogant bastards, but they are arrogant bastards who aren't going to disappear anytime soon. So unfortunately, we'll have to live with it, because 90+ percent of our customers will be using their stuff.
On those rare occasions when I need to do markup w/ css, I'll try to keep it within the sub-set that IE supports, because 1) that is where the customers are at and 2) that sub-set will work fine in other browsers. I'll just have to stay away from all the cool, but unsupported tricks that a fully complient browswer can implement. Otherwise, I'll have to check agents and do multiple-hacks to support each browers, which is painfully inefficient.
Just ran the test on Firefox 1.5.0.6 under Windows XP. Firefox failed to properly render the Acid2 test. Of course, it is BETTER than what IE6 did. Opera 9.1 properly renders the the Acid 2 test. I have yet to try it in IE7, would need to reboot into Vista for that, I am not installing it in XP
The CSS test suite runs all tests in Quirks mode, ment for browsers to preverve binary compatibility. Fixing these bugs in Quirks mode would break a lot of websites. Most CSS bugs get fixed in Standard mode only (IE7 does that), so the test could give a lot of false positives.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
... you can't spell "compliance" without "liance".
.sig works really well in this case.
Actually, I think my old
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
As long as Microsoft has well over fifty percent of the market, web designers as a whole are going to primarily design their website to best display in IE. Even if it sometimes means that the website layout gets a little funky in Firefox. It's what Microsoft depends upon. If Microsoft can hurt their competitors' just by not complying with standards, why on earth should they comply? Really, I'm more interested in seeing what Microsoft does if they continue losing market share like this. Even some of the non-technologically inclined people at my workplace are beginning to use the Firefox I installed on the shared computers, and sometimes asking me to install it on their computer. Eventually, it may reach the point where it damages Microsoft more to not be compliant than to be compliant. (So I'm the optimistic type.) I'll be curious to see if it causes them to change their ways at all.
-> What about PNG, is PNG a standard ?
Cause I'm waiting ie to fully support PNG before I can release my website because all of my picture are in png and the rendering is very bad.
Poor, poor Microsoft not being able to get a browser that meets 1998's standards by 2007. As the article pointed out, it takes years to get it right. Of course, if they hadn't let MSIE rot to begin with, they'd be okay now.
As it stands, it's already been demonstrated that:
Microsoft, one of the largest software companies in the world, is trying to claim they don't have at least equal development muscle to these groups?
Seriously, the problem is of their own making. Now they're trying to fix the biggest bugs in IE6, but they're ignoring some of the biggest features of CSS that it lacks (like display: table*). It's hard to feel any sympathy.
If your CSS has IE6-specific hacks, then you should always comment them out. IE6 executes comments, and normal browsers don't.
I'd rather use my cell phone with a 2 inch display to browse the internet than to use IE 7.