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After remaining mum for months over the extent to which it plans to support the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard with its forthcoming Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 browser, Microsoft has gone public with its plans.
Late last week, Internet Explorer lead program manager Chris Wilson posted to his blog a list of fixes, many of them CSS-related, that Microsoft is planning for IE 7.0.
CSS is a style-sheet language that allows developers to attach font, spacing, speech and other information to structured HTML documents and XML applications. CSS separates the presentation style of documents from document content with the goal of simplifying Web authoring and site maintenance. The most recently approved CSS standard is CSS 2.0.
Microsoft's failure to support completely the Worldwide Web Consortium's CSS standards (beyond version 1.0, with which Microsoft did comply, according to company officials) has been a sticking point for the company. Because of Microsoft's deviance from the standard, developers have been forced to write different versions of Web applications and Web sites.
Until now, developers didn't have high hopes for IE 7.0 on the CSS-standards-compliance front, either. Some Microsoft partners, who requested anonymity, said that Microsoft was wavering on the extent to which it planned to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. They said Microsoft was leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but was not planning to embrace the standard in its entirety.
As a result, Microsoft surprised many with Wilson's post and a commitment to comply with CSS2.
"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," Wilson blogged.
While developers won't see the vast majority of these fixes until Microsoft releases Beta 2 of IE 7.0, among those bugs that Microsoft has committed to fix are the Peekaboo bug, Guillotine bug, No scroll bug, Border chaos bug, Magic Creeping Text bug, and a host of others, according to Wilson's posting.
"I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it's been recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers," Wilson said.
In a follow-up interview with Microsoft Watch on Monday, Wilson elaborated on what Microsoft expects to be able to provide.
While other browsers can claim they are "more compliant" with CSS standards than Microsoft, "I don't know of anyone who has implemented every feature listed in the CSS2 spec," he said.
Wilson said Microsoft would like to be able to be more compliant with CSS2 than it is now or plans to be in the future, but backward-compatibility issues limit what the company can do.
Following a major strategy shift — whereby company officials decided to release a standalone IE update rather than making its browser available only as a component of Windows — Microsoft released a pair of Beta 1 releases of IE 7.0 last week. One IE 7.0 beta is baked into Beta 1 of Windows Vista, the next version of Windows client, which is due to ship in the latter half of 2006. Microsoft also made available a standalone IE 7.0 beta that works on Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 2 systems.
Microsoft has not offered a target date for either Beta 2 or the final release of the standalone IE 7.0 browser. But the standalone release also is set to run on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional x64 systems, too.
Next Page: Developers Weigh In on Microsoft's IE Plans.
In spite of Wilson's commitment to adhere fully to standards, Microsoft is not going to pass the Acid2 browser test, published by the Web Standards Project, by the time IE 7 ships, Wilson admitted.
Wilson said the Acid2 test is "pointedly not a compliance test," meaning passage of it does not guarantee conformance with any specification. Instead, the IE team is focusing on "our known bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs and usability problems first," Wilson said.
"As a wish list, it (Acid2) is really important and useful to my team, but it isn't even intended, in my understanding, as our priority list for IE7," Wilson blogged.
Neither the Web Standards Project nor the W3C did not return requests for comment on Microsoft's CSS plans by the time this article was published.
On the Microsoft IE team blog, the majority of individuals responding to Wilson's posting seemed pleasantly surprised by Microsoft's CSS plans.
"I love you guys! If I had the money I'd come over to the US and kiss your feet!" said one of the more effusive posters.
One poster requested that Microsoft add support for CSS tables to its supported feature list. Another wondered "how the changes in CSS handling will affect the hacks that are currently being used."
But Microsoft's acknowledgement that it won't pass Acid2 didn't sit well with some posters, who said that the latest builds of Apple's Safari, KDE's Konqueror and iCab's iCab browser all have passed that litmus test.
One developer said he remained nonplussed by Microsoft's commitments.
"Look what Microsoft has accomplished by stopping all updates to IE for six to seven years," said Jacques Surveyer, a consultant and author of www.thePhotoFinishes.com and www.theopensourcery.com Web sites. "Not only (have there been no updates to standards on CSS, DOM, HTML, JavaScript, etc. but thwarting of most new Web technologies: XFORMS, JavaScript 2 and E4X, SVG, SMIL, JPEG2000, PNG, DOM rationalization etc, etc. And meanwhile they get to keep their standards-polluting extensions."
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