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.
MS doesn't deserve slack.
There's only one standards compliance test that Microsoft has ever aimed to pass and that's their own.
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
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
if they hadn't been retards and used microsoft-hax and used standards compliant multi-browser html/css and javascript they wouldn't have a problem.
in otherwords: it's their own fucking fault, you code to a vendor-specific set in a non-vendor-specific world you're subject to the whims of that vendor
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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
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
Please quote properly. The full quote is "there isn't an official test suite that exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not." And that is true. A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant or to what degree an implementation is compliant. It can only point out particular things that are broken. If you're thinking of dividing the number of passed tests over the number of total tests, that still won't tell you how compliant an implementation is because it will be weighted according to the number of test cases for each particular language feature. If you weight them differently, then you let your own opinions about what is important into the analysis, which is why he followed up with "And any analysis you can do is going to be somewhat biased."
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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.
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
"Widely used CSS" is that tiny subset that works in IE6. Ofcourse nobody bothers using display:table-cell nor generated content when it fails in browser that 70%-90% visitors use, but these are very useful features.
The post referred to in the article talks about how the developer thinks that the Acid2 Test is biased because the person who made it also has a page that says using IE is dangerous.
My thought is if IE people think that the Acid2 test is biased against IE then why don't they create their own standards compliant test page that works better in IE7(beta) than in Firefox or Opera?
There are tons of non-standards compliant IE-only webpages out there. It would be interesting to see a standards complaiant page where IE works better than Firefox or Opera.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
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!
Translated, "we'll support the parts of the standard that we like." Bastards ... same old arrogant Microsoft.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
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
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.
It can definitely prove that something is non-compliant. But it cannot definitely prove that something is compliant. A hell of a lot of bugs only manifest themselves in unusual circumstances. Unless you have prior knowledge of these bugs, you'd have to be very lucky to coincidentally trigger them with a simple test case.
No, it can't. Suppose there are a hundred testcases for selectors and five testcases for a particular float configuration in wide use on the web. By adding support for more selectors, a Microsoft engineer might pass twenty more testcases, but introduce a regression causing them to fail the five really important float testcases. By your standards, this would be more compliant, even though it would be considered a disaster in terms of compliance.
It doesn't make sense to judge compliance by the number of testcases passed. There isn't a good way of assigning a particular number to how compliant an implementation is. But the real question is why should there be? Does anybody really gain anything by saying that Internet Explorer is 53% compliant instead of 52% compliant? Or does it make more sense to talk about particular bugs and particular features that are supported? I can see how the former might be of use if all you want is a number to criticise Microsoft with, but as a web developer, I can tell you that having a percentage just isn't useful in any way if you are genuinely concerned with practical matters and not political ones.
Do any other browser developers provide a running count of how many CSS testcases they pass and how many they fail?
Or he thinks the same as I do; that such numbers are unimportant and misleading.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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.
This is a false dichotomy in many ways. Will implementing XHTML break backward compatibility with the current rendering engine? Why? It is a completely different mechanism. Will implementing the 50% of CSS2 they claim they have not yet gotten to break someone's crystal reports? Why should it is it does not change the current behavior?
By MS engineer's own estimate they could be 50% more compliant with CSS and completely add XHTML and I don't see how this would effect backwards compatibility at all. No they are not adding the rest of these standards because it costs them a small amount of money and more importantly, because they make money by failing to comply. If they continue to illegally bundle IE then most people will use it unless a huge barrier is overcome. Thus, proprietary Web pages that don't work in other browsers will be common, thus people can't move to other OS's as easily. If they don't support the standards needed, it is much harder for Web applications to provide users with the functions they need to compete. If people move to Web applications then their is no cost for them to switch to another OS, unlike with traditional applications. Thus MS benefits by making Web applications not shackled to Windows hard to implement, so they do that.
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)
Who cares? The CSS in the Acid 2 test is irrelevent to the vast majority of web developers - but for some reason, loads of slashdot readers who aren't full time web-devs and know very little about real-world website developement seem to think that passing Acid 2 is in some way important. Not even FireFox 1.5 supports it.
You should if the standards in question explicitly require the browsers to do so.
As you are a web author, I assume you've written a CSS 2 stylesheet? Are you aware that most CSS 2 stylesheets are invalid CSS 1 stylesheets? And that it's the error handling defined in the CSS 1 specification that defines how your invalid code is handled in older browsers?
Do you plan on ever writing a CSS 3 stylesheet? Because if you do so, you'll be relying on the error handling defined by the CSS 2 specifications and implemented in current browsers. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do that safe in the knowledge that the browsers are going to behave in a certain way when faced with your invalid CSS 2 code?
That is the problem that the Acid2 test is trying to solve by including invalid code. Having invalid code handled correctly is an important part of ensuring forwards compatibility, because what appears to be invalid code to today's implementations could be perfectly reasonable code according to tomorrow's implementations.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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.)
So what? It dosen't support it now, so it must be holding the world back from standards based websites since its the second most popular browser.
In short:
Safari: Passed
Konqueror: Passed
Opera: Passed
Firefox: Working on it, should be two releases away.
Internet Explorer: Ignoring it for now.
Yet Safari and Konq have failed to render many sites for me that render just fine under IE or Firefox. Perhaps the reason IE is ignoring the acid2 test is because its not really that relevent?
'Twas a painful decision to give up modpoints to respond, but I think I need to.
The problem is... there is no IE standard. There are substantial differences between IE 5.5 and IE 6, and it looks like even more differences between IE 6 and IE 7. This isn't the same case as Atom vs. RSS where you have two standards with similar goals but different rules/syntax/etc. This is the case of having an agreed standard and an implementation of that standard that is badly buggy.
If Microsoft had their own standard, they should be maintaining the implementation version to version. But they don't. If you relied on certain IE bugs for your site in IE 5.5, they were fixed and gone in IE 6. Now if you rely on certain IE bugs for IE 6, many of them will be gone in IE 7. This is not a standard. It's just a really badly buggy implementation that will and does change frequently. There is no IE "standard" to code to. Microsoft isn't competing with XHTML/CSS (yet, wait for Avalon in Vista), it's just that their implementation of it really sucks.
In a nutshell, this isn't the case of Betamax vs VHS, Atom vs. RSS, or HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray where there are real standards and Microsoft just so happens to be endorsing one standard over another. The "IE is 90% of marketshare and therefore is the standard" just doesn't apply in that way.
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.