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Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Compliant

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the believe-when-it-renders-stuff-right dept.

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."

7 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Acid Test by celardore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if the browser will pass the Acid Test....

    1. Re:Acid Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Passing the acid test would be a nice feat, but not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it. And it isn't really necessary. IE7 does most of the things right that webdevelopers have always wanted to use but couldn't because IE6 owns the market. The box model implementation is sane now, IE7 does semitransparent PNGs (without requiring non-standard hacks), it supports :hover on everything, and so on. I've recently designed a new site from scratch and tested only with Firefox. Then I loaded the site with IE7 and I didn't have to change a bit. Right now the deficiencies of CSS itself are the biggest hurdle, second only to the legacy browsers.

      I'm mad at Microsoft for leaving us in the cold for so long, but even though I hate the IE7 user interface, I think the rendering engine really is good enough. Just make sure that IE7 gets pushed to each and every IE6 user out there. No bullshit like restricting it to Vista or XPSP2 please.

  2. Standards Compliance at Cost by salesgeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One major issue is that many sites do not render as nicely in IE7 as they do in IE6. This is going to be a headache for IT managers and marketing managers for quite some time...

    and for the love of money, think of all the FrontPage sites...

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  3. Too easy to debunk by erroneus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Someone, or more likely several someones, will independantly enumerate every area of non-compliance that exists in MSIE7. (Has it been released yet? I haven't seen an installation for Linux yet... I have MSIE6 on my Linux laptop thanks to some very clever script writers: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html)

    That said, I have read where even Firefox isn't yet 100% compliant. I'm usure of how much difficulty that causes web developers though. Actually, I don't know much of anything about the web except that I use Firefox pretty exclusively. If MSIE7 was made at least as compliant as Firefox, it would actually kinda bother me as it would give me a lot less leverage to keep my Firefox deployment where I work.

  4. Re:The irony by richdun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Except that it isn't over 80% any more. The latest stats I saw (July 2006 I think) put IE at 73-75% and falling - still very high, but not nearly as dominant. Certain markets (universities, for instance) have much, much lower rates.

    IE7 may change that, as many recent Firefox converts may switch back when it comes through as a security release. The real wildcard though is just how much marketshare Apple is really capturing - IE will never again be available for Mac, and if they (Apple) are to be believed, they had something like 15-20% of the laptop sales marketshare last quarter (or month...too many stats!), and are growing. It may be a case of too little, too late, but with Vista and Leopard we could see a swing in browser marketshare not seen since IE trounced Netscape.

  5. Quote from his blog by kripkenstein · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility.

    Emphasis mine, changing the meaning a bit, but bear with me. If you read Chris Wilson's blog here, then you can see the following quote:

    It's been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it's actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE.

    Again, emphasis mine (not the caps, though, just the boldface). So - if it weren't for this Chris guy, CSS wouldn't even have been implemented in IE. If he's right, that says a lot about Microsoft. I tend to believe him here.

  6. Re:Expanding Box Bug by rjstanford · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, I just visited that link with IE7, and it rendered the page identically to Firefox. So yes, they have fixed that bug.

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