Microsoft Gives Credit Where Credit is Due

But does it mean they're actually going to FIX anything?

[createErrorMsg]

This one [blogs.msdn.com] seems to have slipped under the CSS Forum radar. Microsoft lead program manager Chris Wilson writes on the IEBlog that...

There is some great work that has been done in harvesting the collective knowledge of the web development community, such as on quirksmode, meyerweb.com, CSSVault, glish and Position Is Everything. We pay a lot of attention to this kind of thoughtful insight into the biggest problems web developers face today.

Just trying to shut people up or finally admitting that web developers are onto something when they say that IE has real problems?

And why isn't WebmasterWorld on that list? ;)

cEM

[iamlost]

I almost posted it on the weekend but it didn't really say anything. Except for the following:

We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility, and under quirks mode when it’s not damaging to our backwards compatibility.

which might mean that something undefined (but implying perhaps box model compliance) will change.

Still a matter of wait and see and wait ...

[Farix]

Seems that Microsoft has found themselves between a rock and a hard place of other own making. Webdevelopers who like to see IE become more compliant to the W3C recommendations and corporate "suits" who won't understand why Microsoft is chancing their implementation for "no reason whatsoever".

[createErrorMsg]

This recent thread [webmasterworld.com] indirectly raises some interesting thoughts regarding MSIE, it's current lack of standards support, and the question of whether or not they will incorporate better standards support in the near future.

Several webmasters in that thread were discussing the fact that CSS and CSS-P are not worth the effort to learn for single-site owners with plain, uncomplicated HTML pages. They site the fact that there are so many cross-browser problems (and refer to the abundance of "My site doesn't work in..." threads here) as evidence that they would be better off just sticking with their existing, non-standards based pages.

However, in the IEBlog article linked above, Wilson says...

Given the strong usage of IE in the corporate space as well as embedded in applications, we have a strong requirement for backwards compatibility with our previous behavior, compliant or not; that requirement does not mean “don’t touch anything”, it is just a recognition that keeping our engine in sync across strict and quirks modes is challenging when quirks mode has to work nearly exactly the same as it always has.
my bold

I take this to mean that one reason IE has not incorporated better standards support (and perhaps a reason they will not do better at it in the future?) is that old pages, applications, etc that use legacy technology still have to function properly in their browser. The quote seems to indicate that adding standards support will break quirks support.

The fact that other browsers (read, FireFox) manage to juggle this just fine is beside the point, since the important thing here is the IE team's perception of what they can and can't successfully do. If they believe adding more standards support will break up their support for older technology, and that keeps them from adding standards support to their browser, then, in essence, sites, pages and applications that rely on deprecated HTML, tables-based layouts, and other non-standards based design practices are partly to blame for the very problems that are keeping people from updating these technologies on their sites!

Talk about a viscious circle.

cEM

[Longhaired Genius]

The problem for Microsoft is not primarily the wider web, where the continuing presence of other browsers have kept things from getting too much out of hand, but the corporate intranets that have always been IE only and are coded by non-experts with quirky code that Microsoft has promoted.

To continue to render those and standards based sites in the same browser will be the problem. Ha!

[MatthewHSE]

I just read a very scary comment on a blog that suggests IE7 may fix a few bugs, but will not support CSS any/much better than it does now, possibly resulting in some of our IE hacks no longer working but the problems they used to fix still existing. The very thought that

* html

might not work anymore is almost frightening to me!