Internet Explorer program manager Markus Mielke acknowledged that Microsoft has a long road ahead in efforts to achieve CSS standards compliance, saying IE7 was only a "stepping stone." The company has made over 200 "behavior changes" for CSS 2.1, which it outlined Tuesday. IE7 is currently being locked down and is expected to be completed later this year. The new browser has largely been layout-complete since March, with minor tweaks and interface improvements coming in Beta 2 and Beta 3 this summer. Mielke notes that Microsoft listened to feedback and prioritized fixes and features for IE7, in addition to partnering with the Web Standards Project. "We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us," he said. "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," Mielke added. Still, the slew of CSS bug fixes may not encourage developers to fix their sites or herald the end to CSS hacks, even once IE7 reaches broad adoption. The changes only take affect when a DOCTYPE is set on the Web site. "To preserve application compatibility we will not make any behavioral changes to “quirks mode†as it has been established since IE6," Mielke said. "As we struggle to balance the needs of our user customers with the desires of web developers, we need your help. The only way for us to continue to improve our standards support is to get your help in changing your sites for IE7." Microsoft is providing a set of documentation and tools that developers can use to prepare for IE7, which will also be the default browser in Windows Vista. "We are already planning for the next IE release and will continue down the road of improving our CSS support," Mielke added.
If they stick to standards, good then. We all know that realisitically, those who only know IE as a web browser will stick to it. A few years down the track things may be different but most of your website visitors probably use IE. In this case, I hope those users upgrade to IE7 at the very least rather than continue using IE 5.x or 6.x. Spent like 4 hours working on part of one my websites which showed up properly in Opera & FF but just did not come out right in IE6 - no matter how much I tweaked the code and layout. My adsense ads went across 2 lines instead of being on 1 line (had 2 ads) as a result so now I will spend hours remodeling simply because IE6 does not render according to standards.
I really imagine the nightmare being that for at least the first two quarters following release, IE6 will still be used by a major segment of internet users - which means that sites will have to maintain hacks for IE6, standard CSS for firefox/mozilla, and who knows what for IE7. If history plays out correctly, some major sites will "require" IE7 for the most effective interaction - which will account for a good deal of user upgrades, and a major security hole will account for another significant portion. What I really am looking forward to is the idea that RSS will go from a niche market technology to a mass market technology - and that will happen virtually overnight. Start studying up on how to best make use of RSS feeds because that will be the most significant change in the internet world that will take place for a long time. Think about it - firefox has a significantly smaller marketshare than IE, and many people who use firefox don't take advantage of live bookmarks. Places like feedburner, newsgator, syndic8, etc. are really the realm of power-bloggers and techies right now - but with IE7 being deployed to millions of desktops RSS becomes a new gadget for everyone to play with. People will start saying "I always wondered what that orange thing was." Look for Feedburner and Newsgator to quadruple in value and for RSS information, utilities, and tutorials to become major traffic generation markets. I also imagine that more innovative usage of RSS is around the corner and podcasts/videocasts to become must haves on quality sites rather than the gadget features that they are now. Logitech will make some cash too by selling a lot of low end video and audio gadgets to hobby webmasters.
Why can't they follow standards? Why do I have to make sites for IE7 or IE999 ? Last week I made a gorgeous site, just to discover that IE6 doesn't accept Transparent PNG's without adding a javascript code, that calls an activex, and so on. I won't add that!