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."
Then WTF is http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ ??
MS has said that it will not pass the Acid2 test.
to quote from the article
"I said on the IE Blog that in IE7 we were not going to pass the Acid2 test"
He goes on to note that a number of the things used in the acid2 test are to not likey to be high on their priorities and would be focusing on more widely used CSS.
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
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!!!!!
Microosoft's figures sounds about right from a CSS standard report I saw elsewhere. ;-)
It indicated something like ~60% for IE, approx. 90% for Firefox, and most for Opera.
Unfortunately I don't recall the URL, so that's the sloppy figures you'll get from me.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The usual crap by slashdot editors...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Someone, or more likely several someones, will independantly enumerate every area of non-compliance that exists in MSIE7.
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"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'll bite. The acid test is invalid syntax because the standards which are tested against also define behaviour in presence of syntax errors. The test checks if the browser renders documents as defined in the standard, not just if it renders proper documents as defined in the standard. IMHO browsers should simply reject broken documents or at least give a big fat red warning each and every time, but that's not how the standards are written.
This isn't a Microsoft problem. This is a problem that every company and/or web developer must deal with. If they had created their pages to begin with more than one browser in mind, it would not have been a problem.
Every web developer must make a choice in the beginning which browsers he/she cares to support. IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Konqueror... etc. They all render differently. And different version of all of those render differently. However, standards compliance means you can at least depend on some things working all of the time. If you just pick one of those, no matter how big the market share you are shooting yourself in the foot. And IMNSHO, you'd deserve it too.
Star Pirates
Please do not spread this myth. It is simply not true. If you had actually read the Acid2 technical guide instead of relying on Slashdot hearsay, you would know this. From a previous comment of mine:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
when you install the AHEM font six out of seven pass.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
Flip side is that every conformance test suite on the planet does stuff like this. The errors generated by mistakes are at least as important as the ability to work with valid input.
To take your C compiler example, if you wrote C code that left off every semicolon, you would not expect the compiler to say "oh, I'm going to add semicolons where needed". You would expect it to generate an error message. If, instead, it inserts semicolons where needed, it SHOULD fail the test because it will confuse the heck out of people trying to write and debug code.
In a similar way, detecting bad CSS and behaving in a consistent way is at least as important as behaving consistently for valid CSS. If one browser accepts slightly invalid CSS, that browser is no longer useful as a mechanism for testing your page because some other browser will choke on contents that this browser displays "correctly" (as intended instead of as written).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You would if the C standard explicitly required compilers to do so.
The fact is, it doesn't make much sense to compare CSS to C. One is an imperative programming language, the other is a declarative style language. You can't miss out bits of a C program and still have it work right, but CSS is designed around the idea that you can do just that.
I don't want to include a CSS 3 property in my stylesheet only to have every CSS 2 browser simply throw everything away, I want them to apply the CSS 2 properties they do understand and ignore the bits they don't. Fortunately, this is exactly what the CSS specifications require, which is why the Acid2 test includes invalid code - it's testing this part of the specification.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it.
Actually, gecko does pass it. The problem is that firefox 2.0 won't use that revision of the gecko core, only 3.0 will use it.
Now, even if current Firefox and future firefox 2.0 are not passing it, they're NEAR of passing it. IE7 rendering does not even look like a smiley.
I think the rendering engine really is good enough
Yeah, the software company number 1 of the world should be proud of shipping a widely used browser (IE is the most used application in the world) whose rendering engine is the worst one in the world, but that is "enought" only because IE defines what is "enought". If Firefox had 80% of market share, web developers would use lots features that IE does not even dreams to support until they ship IE8 in a couple of years. And nobody would use IE, because their engine is NOT "enought".
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.
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.
You misunderstood. He was implying that my standards support tables may have been biased. I am not affiliated with WaSP or the Acid2 test.
In my tables, I try to accurately describe exactly what features are handled incorrectly under which conditions. The tables are very much laid out as the features are in the specifications and therefore I don't see any legitimacy to his argument that I shouldn't note IE's lack of "inherit" support on every applicable CSS property. I maintain a complete public log of every change made to the information and you can get an RSS/Atom feed on it. If he believes that there is bias in my tables (aside from the fact that all features are weighted equally regardless of real-world usefulness, which is done to avoid bias), he should say exactly what the problems are rather than falling back on an ad hominem response. I made my tables to be useful to web developers and researchers, and I certainly don't want any bias in them.
I wrote the "Internet Explorer is dangerous" article mainly in response to IE's obviously poor standards support, as well as their poor record of fixing security issues. I don't have any specific anti-Microsoft agenda, but rather an anti-outdated-software agenda. As long as IE or any other browser with significant market share is seriously behind the rest of the major browsers in standards support, I will call it out in the interest of fair competition and progress. But if Microsoft pulls a miracle and makes IE even close to as standards-compliant as Firefox and Opera, I'll gladly remove the article and instead just encourage people to upgrade.
As an anonymous coward has already remarked, I was talking about the turning point for the browser wars.
At the time, I installed a late IE4 beta on NT 4 Workstation. After the obligatory shutdown it never booted again and I had to reinstall NT - this was before the days of Recovery Console or any of the nice rollback stuff that's present in XP. I figured if that was the kind of quality Microsoft considered late beta, Netscape had nothing to worry about. Boy was I wrong.
I installed IE7 beta 2 on my work development PC. Then it caused problems with the (very complicated) website I work on. So I tried to uninstall it and all I did was make it look like my old IE6. The problems still remained until I installed beta3.
This indicates to me that the "uninstall" routine only changes the interface, not the upgrades it did to your OS in the background.
The moral of this story: All software has beta (or alpha) in the title for a reason and should only be installed on machines that do not actually need to work on a 24*7 basis.
(oh - and IE7 also fails the acid test and does not generate a neat smiley face)
I dont read