Yes, it’s true … in case you hadn’t read this earlier, Microsoft is working on a new version of IE(Internet Explorer) which will be available on Windows XP and Longhorn … the biggest news is that they have their own blog about IE.
They’re posting all sorts of news there, and the latests post is that IE7 Has Tabs … however, other interesting posts have been put up in the last few months. For instance: they fixed PNG support and they are working on many of the worst CSS bugs … however, they’ve stated for the record that they don’t plan on doing a full implementation of CSS2 — which is hardly suprising, since to my knowledge no other browser fully supports it anyway.
Honestly, let me veer off-topic here for a minute: CSS2 is a poor spec, and has way too much in it. If the W3C had any real-world smarts they’d quit wasting time developing new versions of standards that nobody can support, and they would break up the CSS spec the way they did with XML. That way a browser could state that they have full support for CSS2-text-formatting or CSS2-box-model or CSS2-Selectors or CSS2-inheritance … and we’d be able to have some absolutes as to what parts of CSS it’s actually okay to use, instead of the current approach where you simply have to try it in every version of every modern browser and see what works and what doesn’t (which of course involves owning at least two computers and setting up three operating systems and at least 9 browsers) Web Standards Group and browser developers are all picking and choosing which peices they support. Let me know when your favorite browser supports CSS2.1 and can claim that 95% of it’s users have upgraded to the version which supports it.
Well, now that I’ve typed all that, I lost my train of thought about the IE blog so you’re just going to have to go there and browse the archived posts yourself.
6 Comments
You have an error, you have started en STRONG tag but you havenA?t closed it yet, so all the page is with STRONG text.
Yep, thanks.
So basically the W3C should screw the CSS standard just so that IE can pretend that its standards-compliant?
According to the BBC, IE 7 also has RSS support (and adds some MSHTML-style ‘additions’ to the format)
break up CSS? ok. its called CSS3
Yes, I’ve heard about the new RSS support as well, and about CSS3 … The initial CSS3 proposals were published almost five years ago … and we still don’t have anything but a bunch of “Working Draft“s and “Candidate Recomendations,” and no end in sight. Certainly isn’t worth trying to implement it …
As a side note: I certainly am not suggesting that the spec should be revised to help IE, quite the opposite: I’d rather if CSS were replaced with an xml-based stylesheet language … but failing that, I’m just saying I wish it were broken into parts, so that web browser developers could honestly tell us what works and what doesn’t … so we could avoid wasting our time learning specs (cough – css3 – cough) that don’t play in the real world.
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Internet Explorer 7
He said the new version will be built on the work they did in SP2, and other things. Gates mentioned they will go further to defend IE users from phishing and other deceptive software.