IE7: Were they ready? 26 Oct 2006

Sharon Peak 26 Oct 2006 08:35 PM

sad to see that a failure to adopt web standards has protected big industry (somewhat) from Microsoft's "big" rollout. How many screenreader users suffer because of complicated and outdated html? It's a shame that the release of ie 7 hasn't forced more businesses to address the accessibility of their web code.

ryan 27 Oct 2006 10:27 AM

Out of interest, did you test on Vista or XP?

David Dorward 27 Oct 2006 05:48 PM

standards-compliant sites - particularly those using hacks and filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6

Depending on parsing bugs in browsers is hardly in the spirit of webstandards, and there are been warnings about depending on them for a very long time.

Bill W. 27 Oct 2006 06:22 PM

Speaking of broken pages and standards. Your "linked scrolling" examples of the broken layouts is crashing my Safari browser. Not too many sites out there that can manage to do that.

ray 28 Oct 2006 11:20 PM

How many sites suffered as a result of any other browser (especially Firefox) rolling out?

ZERO.

MS can take a flying leap! I'm sick, sick, sick of doing extra work to get my standards-compliant code to work in their faulty product!

Jon 29 Oct 2006 11:36 PM

Ray: Unfortinately some sites out there are broken in Firefox and Opera because of being ultra MSIE complient. Other than that, I full heartedly agree with you.

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis 30 Oct 2006 09:24 AM

Ray: Would it be better for web progress if those upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 switched to Firefox 2.0 instead? Of course. But let's not pretend that any browser roll-out is without its problems. For example, Firefox 2.0 has infuriated some web developers by replacing their XSL with its own feed styling (Mozillla Bug 338621).

If you simply coded to standards rather than catering to particular browsers then you have little to fear from IE7. The people who need to worry are those whose standard CSS nevertheless used hacks and filters that depended on non-standard behaviour in Internet Explorer 6. These have now broken, and extra work is now required, precisely because IE7 is more standards compliant than IE6.

Gary 30 Oct 2006 10:46 AM

While Alliance and Leicester may have rectified the problems on their homepage, the login area of their site is really bad in IE7.

Mike Cherim 31 Oct 2006 03:03 PM

Interesting. All my sites could have been added to the ready list, but it was no accident. With the release of Beta 2 went through them and fixed a few issues -- mostly the IE7 whitespace bug. About one-third required attention.

David Smallcombe 31 Oct 2006 10:05 PM

"standards-compliant sites"

There was a fad at one time when every developer with a blog and too much time on their hands would do whatever it takes to comply with these standards. If they discovered a hack that accomplished this, they would proudly name it after themselves and post it for everyone to admire and copy.

Then came all these articles describing how some layout could be achieve (sometimes under very limited conditions) with the usage of these hacks. The css code in these cases were often bloated, difficult to read, and used half a dozen or more hacks/filters. Not only that, the html was often bloated as well. Like 3 wrapper divs?! How is that clean or meaningful? That's in one article about one layout issue. Imagine an entire page or website. Like a previous poster said, this is not in the spirit of webstandards.

Jonathan Nicol 1 Nov 2006 06:26 AM

Ray said:

"How many sites suffered as a result of any other browser (especially Firefox) rolling out?

ZERO."

I disagree. I occassionally come across sites that majorly break in Firefox. No fault of Firefox, just that the developer obviously tested only in IE, and probably used a bucket load of proprietory IE code.

And remember when netscape 6 was released? It broke almost every Netscape 4 site in existence. Ultimately, Netscape took a stand for web standards and paid the price in market share. Progress always come at a price I guess!

I commend MS for at least moving forward, instead of standing still. Remember that if sites break in IE7 it isn't usually due to faults in IE7, it is due to faults in IE6 (and the hacks that people employed to get IE6 to render pages correctly).

Martin Kool 2 Nov 2006 10:35 AM

In my experience IE7 problems centered around the double margin fixes I applied for IE browsers in general and that IE7 no longer treats a height as a min-height and will not force the height to fit the content.

The first was my bad because my conditional comments should have targeted only browser versions that suffered from that bug and with the second I relied on the flaws of a browser, which is really a silly thing to do.

Bottom line, I am quite convinced that most IE7 incompatible sites are in that state because they present themselves to that browser with non standard markup and styles.

Peter Sylwester 2 Nov 2006 07:47 PM

In my opinion, standards-compliance and IE6-compulsion are often mutually-exclusive goals, and so it is rather unfair to disparage the standards-compliant effort (and even IE7) by stating "IE7 tends to struggle most with standards-compliant sites - particularly those using hacks and filters to achieve decent presentation in IE6".

I believe what IE7 struggles with are IE6 hacks and filters, and the pseudo-standards that many sites are/were lulled into by IE6.

I have just spent a good long while on a major standards-compliant corporate redevelopment in which IE6-compulsion was avoided at all cost. The number of hacks required was reduced remarkably, and the result validates AND works just fine in both IE7 and IE6.

snickering monkey 3 Nov 2006 03:12 AM

it is extremely generous to say that firefox/opera/safari/etc "broke" a site where IE specific features were leveraged. the site is broken by design and implementation - the browser plays no role in that.

it is not the responsibility of every company on earth to conform their products to microsoft's interpretation of standards nor to implement microsoft's proprietary extensions.

Richard 3 Nov 2006 12:14 PM

"Generalising our findings to the internet as a whole - which is admittedly of dubious meaning..."

I think that should read, "Generalising our findings to the internet as a whole - which is admittedly completely meaningless and a waste of time, but no-one understands statistics anyway, so..."

giovanni 6 Nov 2006 07:43 PM

...just say NO to ie7. make your life easier and use any other browser. i use firefox and safari an i am happier for it. IE7 IS NOT standard complient.

Joshua Allen [msft] 9 Nov 2006 01:10 AM

It's really misleading to claim that the sites which use the most hacks are the most standards-conforming. Hacks are unsupported bugs in browsers which designers use to fork code -- the hacks would have been unnecessary if the browsers were 100% conforming. Continue supporting these would have required IE to maintain backwards bug compat in many cases (that is, be LESS standards conformant) and would have gone against the goal of standards conforming future. Removal of the CSS hacks was made primarily FOR, and with the support of, the standards advocate community.

Joshua Allen [msft] 9 Nov 2006 01:12 AM

BTW, we released a tool that site owners can use to find the unsupported CSS hacks. It's part of the readiness kit, which also talks about how designers can write CSS that doesn't depend on browser quirks: link

Dennis Koks 9 Nov 2006 03:20 PM

If IE would only send out more updates from time to time instead of waiting 5 years. Browers like Firefox supported new features for , for example css, which work really well and make lives of the people who write them a lot easier.

But because the majority (still) uses IE you can't use those features. In this way IE is holding back the rest. And when finally IE 7 becomes the standard, it will all be exactly the same all over again.

If only more people started using a different browser.....pff

David McDonald 10 Nov 2006 05:22 AM

I built the front-end for the BHP Billiton site and ensured that the XHTML/CSS was standards compliant and worked cross browser.

Unfortunately, you have labeled the site 'not ready' due to one line of third party code (the shareprice) that we have no control over.

I feel this is a little harsh and doesn't take into consideration the real-life situations that arise when building a corporate website.