Wednesday, 23 August 2006

Microsoft Details CSS Changes for IE7

Microsoft is ready to shipped its next version of web browser Internet explorer 7 but the IE team admits that it still has a long way ahead to achieve CSS standard compliance. "We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us," wrote Markus Mielke on his blog.

The company has over 200 behavior changes (bug fixes or new features) under strict mode to improve CSS2.1 compliance. All this work has been done under the switch only, since all changes required behavioral updates to be more in line what the CSS spec specifies.

Mielke said that feedbacks were taken into consideration to address the most grievous bugs and prioritize which features to put in for IE7.

"IE 7 is a stepping stone in our effort to improve our standards compliance (especially around CSS). As an example, in the platform we did not focus on any proprietary properties – though we may try out new features in the future using the official –ms- prefix, following the CSS extension mechanism," said Mielke.

Mielke said that to preserve application compatibility the team will not make any behavioral changes to “quirks mode” as it has been established since IE6.