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."

Comments

"no official CSS test suite"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Then WTF is http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ ??

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

[Bogtha]

No. Not even close. Throw away the idea that he's arguing that Internet Explorer 7 is standards compliant. It's a complete fabrication; he never claimed that.

What he is saying is that they've done a lot of work in the area of standards compliance, there are moderate improvements, and that it doesn't really make sense to say that it supports 57.324% of the specification or whatever kind of number you can come up with, because there's really no sensible way of measuring something like that objectively.

Chris Wilson isn't a marketer, either. He's worked on Internet Explorer for years, he was on the W3C CSS working group and has his name in the acknowledgements of the specifications. I believe him when he claims to be working hard to bring Internet Explorer into compliance, but there's only so much a person can do without support from above.

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

[Bob9113]

"...exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not."
A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant

Yes, it can. If the question is boolean, then the test pointed to by grandparent definitely can give an objective answer. Currently, every browser I know of would fail, but it can give an answer.

or to what degree an implementation is compliant.

Yes, it can. It can give you a consistent answer on the number of passed and failed tests. That number may be biased for a given single run, but it can give a consistent answer, so it can be used to test relative compliance. It may give a fuzzy response that is open to interpretation, but I would bet that when testing different versions of the same browser, the answer would almost always be clear. It would be something like this:

IE6: Passed; 77. Failed; 39.
IE7: Passed; 92, Failed; 24.
IE7 Relative to IE6:
Passed in IE6, Failed in IE7; 2.
Passed in IE7, Failed in IE6; 17.

"One of the things I said in my post is that 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"

Actually, it's easy. There's an example of the numbers above. Are the numbers fuzzy? Yes. Does it provide, "an analysis of exactly where you are"? Yes. It is, "an analysis" and it is based on "exactly where you are." Is the result fuzzy? Of course. Every test of every human endeavor in history has either had a loose question or given a fuzzy result. Now stop being a sissy and answer the damned question.

"we really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements. That was really the largest focus of our platform work overall."

If that is the case (though when someone uses "really" twice in two sentences without providing supporting evidence I think he doth protest too much), and this guy really is involved in the project, then he should have those numbers tatooed on his inner thigh. If CSS and HTML compliance really was the largest focus of the largest software company ever, he would at least be able to say something. He would be able to say, "I don't think these numbers are perfect, but here's what we get on the official test suite."

If MS really were focusing on those tests, even if he really believed that taking number passed over number failed was such a great injustice, they would have those numbers printed in 120 point font and hung on the wall of the developer area. He could have said, "Well, I can't give you a percentage, because percentages are inherently subjective - they weight every test the same which does not necessarily reflect the value of each test to the total user experience. And though the results are subjective, the tests are objective, and we track them like a hawk. Hey - we're the biggest software company in the world. Software loves tests. So, while I reiterate that these numbers are't perfect, I can tell you that IE7 now passes 17 tests that IE6 did not, and failed 2 that IE6 passed, using the W3C's standard set of CSS 2.1 tests. You can get the specific list of test results at www.microsoft.com/ie7-css-test/."

Or he can say none of that, and I will remain unclear on Microsoft's current view on standards. I won't claim that I know them to be as bad as they have been, simply that what this guy says is sound and fury signifying nothing. Which is all that GP was saying.

He claims that this particular course is their "largest focus", a course which they have repeatedly faltered from, with apparent intent, in the past. He says there is no way of providing a number, without even acknowledging the existence of the official set of tests. Not even to say they suck. Either he doesn't know they exist, or he doesn't feel they are important, or he feels the results would leave the audience nonplussed. The one thing we can say for sure is not the case is what he is implicitly claiming; that they are deeply interested in passing the tests, that they always know the results for the latest build, and that they are proud of their accomplishments.

Re:Acid Test

[rednuhter]

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.

Hilarious

[SkunkPussy]

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.

Translations from the managerese

[dpbsmith]

"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.

Re:Acid Test

[Bogtha]

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:

Have you actually bothered to read the Acid2 page? Because I hear this repeated all the time, and it's downright misleading.

There is a checklist of about a dozen things the Acid2 page tests. Incorrect code is just one of them. It is necessary to include incorrect code in a test like this. How else are you going to check whether a browser follows the CSS error handling rules?

It's incorrect code, sure, but it's incorrect code that has a defined rendering according to the CSS specifications. It's not something a compliant browser would trip up on. There is a correct way to parse the incorrect code, and the Acid2 page tests to see if a browser parses it correctly - among many other things it tests for.

Where are you guys getting this idea that the Acid2 test is all about error handling? It's a very small part of the test, but plenty of Slashdotters seem convinced that the test revolves around broken code and nothing else. Was there a weekly meeting I missed wher eyou all got this myth drilled into your heads?

More like 6 out of 7

[oliverthered]

when you install the AHEM font six out of seven pass.

Re:More like 6 out of 7

[_xeno_]

It would have been really nice of the W3C to mention that somewhere in the test suite. Unfortunately they neglect to mention that in the test suite, on the test suite "home page," and in the test suite documentation. They even neglect to offer a full download of the suite (you can use wget for that).

Even their own test suite documentation neglects to mention the font requirement. In fact, the only place they mention it is on the test authoring guidelines which is not something I'd expect to read when just running tests.

If I get the time, I think I'll try and bundle the test suite up WITH the Ahem font and try and run it again. Maybe even use the CSS font-embedding extension so you don't actually need to install the font.

But I can see why people may not like that test suite. Without a "full suite download" it's a bit of a pain to use.

Re:Acid Test

[Bogtha]

If you wrote C code like the Acid test, you wouldn't expect it to compile.

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.

Re:Acid Test

[diegocgteleline.es]

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".