We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

- Dean Hachamovitch on the IEBlog

This is great news, kudos to the Microsoft team for listening to the community and changing their approach.

(for more background see Jeremy Keith and Jeffery Zeldman's articles in issue 253 of A List Apart)

Markus Mielke has published the final list of CSS changes for IE7 now that they're in lockdown and getting ready for shipping.

In all, we made over 200 behavior changes (bug fixes or new features) under strict mode to improve CSS2.1 compliance.

Some of the fixes include the infamous peekaboo bug, three pixel text jog, and doubled float-margin bug.

As well as the bug fixes there are other improvements including :hover on all elements not just <a>, background-attachment: fixed working on all elements, and support for min/max width/height (finally!!).

I'm disappointed that display: table still isn't in there but there is hope for the future

We are already planning for the next IE release and will continue down the road of improving our CSS support.

Praise where praise is due, I think the team over there has done a great job so far. Now I (and many others) want to see this kept up.

As part of their expanding developerWorks series of articles IBM have decided to use Drupal for a sample IT project entitled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”.

They evaluated a number of different Content Management Systems/Frameworks including Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and Mambo, but in the end they went with Drupal.

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we'll revisit these and any new entries in the field.

Given the extremely high standard of the developerWorks articles I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I'm always on the lookout for new ways to make Drupal jump through hoops.

Update: The second part of the series has been published, focusing on designing for an effective user experience.

Update: Here's an overview page linking to all 5 articles.

Here's the IEBlog entry or just go straight to the download page. Ho hum, there goes the next couple of weeks while we get some empirical testing done.

Details of the CSS parser fixes can be found on the IEBlog here and here.

Update: a link to the release notes would probably help too.

There's a very nice article over at alt tags about Microsoft and whether web standards fit into their business plans at all.

While Microsoft may pay lip service to web standards, a look at their product line suggests they have no interest in supporting the standards they’ve helped create. Face it, xHTML and CSS just aren’t as sexy as .Net and web services. Microsoft clearly has other priorities and a closer investigation of the facts seems to indicate that support for web standards is hardly a blip on their corporate radar.

This is an extrememly well written piece that should give all of us pause for thought, and with any luck may prompt increased pressure on Microsoft to make standards an intergral part of their offerings.

I'm now off to code up some workarounds for IE5.

Hat tip: Chris & the #evolt spool.