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.

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

[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".