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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
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
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
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.
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
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)
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