It’s good to see a road map of sorts appearing on the IEBlog outlining what has been fixed in beta 2 with regards to standards support, and what’s to come further down the line.
Chris Wilson says:
In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well. Though you won’t see (most of) these until Beta 2, we have already fixed the following bugs from PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode:
- Peekaboo bug
- Guillotine bug
- Duplicate Character bug
- Border Chaos
- No Scroll bug
- 3 Pixel Text Jog
- Magic Creeping Text bug
- Bottom Margin bug on Hover
- Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
- IE/Win Line-height bug
- Double Float Margin Bug
- Quirky Percentages in IE
- Duplicate indent
- Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
- 1 px border style
- Disappearing List-background
- Fix width:auto
In addition we’ve added support for the following
- HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
- Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
- CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
- CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
- Alpha channel in PNG images
- Fix :hover on all elements
- Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards.
This is very encouraging stuff and good to hear that there is a real push within the IE team to comply with web standards. Microsoft are far from being forgiven for their past sins, but this is a very promising start. Here’s hoping they deliver.
(For more background see Molly Holzschlag’s post on WaSP about the release of IE7 beta 1)