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)

This has to be some kind of joke?

Right?

It's all an elaborate ruse and in a couple of days, after we've all blogged about it, they'll turn round and say “You didn't seriously think we were this out of touch did you? Suckers!”

Please tell me that's what's going to happen.

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches. In its current state, version targeting is a cure that will kill the patient. Version targeting could have been an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate innovation. Instead, the proposed default behavior demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web, a place that according to its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will always be “a little bit broken.”

• Jeremy Keith

Sharepoint 2007 is proof positive that Microsoft doesn’t get the community thing

Clay Newton commenting on Scobleizer.

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.

More news on the Internet Explorer front from the IE blog:

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

There will be the option to roll back to IE6 at any point or ignore the update (up to a certain point I should imagine) for those corporate installations that need to take their time about these things.

I think pumping it out through Automatic Update is a good thing, and not just from the security point of view. As a web developer I'm all for a mechanism that gets a more standards compliant rendering engine out there onto as many computers as possible. The memories of the upgrade path from IE5 to IE6, and watching visitor statistics slowly change, is still indelibly etched on my mind.

I'm still confused about what they're playing at with the user interface though.

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.

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)

Chris Wilson has posted some more details about IE7 on the IEBlog, and so far so good. Looks like it's more than just a security fix with better standards support on the way. So far he's confirmed alpha channel support in PNGs and fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs.

In other news Dave Hyatt is rattling through Safari's Acid2 bugs. I'm beginning to think he doesn't sleep you know.

A post from Tony Chor, the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team details some of the changes in Internet Explorer for XP SP2. A couple of things caught my eye..

IE in XP SP2 stops all currently known critical exploits, so it’s a heck of a lot more secure than pretty much any other browser

Really? Mighty strong words given IE's history.

Maybe he missed off "...that was released in 1995" from the end of that sentence. We'll see how this all pans out once the number of SP2 installs starts to grow.

Also, I'm hoping that the comment

We also came up with a very original idea – popup blocking

was meant to be funny, but I really can't tell.