Roy Schestowitz:
Paul Thurrott:
Whoever that guy is. Judging by this one article, he is noöne to be
taken serious (regarding webdesign).
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/...7208.html?Ad=1
I don't understand why webdesigners are disappointed that they are not
included in the IE7b1 testing group, because for all I know this one
doesn't change that much for them anyway. If IE7b2 was restricted in the
same way, I could understand the disappointment, if it indeed included
the promised bug-fixes and improvements. Until then let sysadmins etc.
check out the alleged security improvements.
Of course it's sad, but nothing new, that MS doesn't comply to industry
standards, where beta versions are pretty much feature-fixed---some
attribute that to release candidates (RC) only, though. Therefore beta1
would have to be considered an alpha release or, in Opera's terms, a
technical preview (TP).
Chris Wilson's blog post
<http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx> lists many of
the main annoyances with IE today, so, if they're indeed being taken
care of, we should be glad, instead of calling for boycot. Noöne serious
expects Microsoft to become the leader in standards compliance with
their first release in five years (not counting IE/Mac).
Regarding Acid2, it's nice to fulfill that, which Firefox and Opera
don't, but the (still incomplete) CSS 2.1 test suite is more important.
It's reasonable for MS and other browser developers to target CSS 2.1
conformance now, instead of 2.0.
One CSS 2.1 feature we likely won't see in IE7 are the table related
values of the 'display' value, because that would probably require a
complete rewrite of one of the major parts of the rendering engine.
Maybe they should have checked out the possibility of porting and
improving Tasman, the rendering engine of IE5/Mac, because that doesn't
have as much legacy ballast---what do I know, maybe they did.
Backwards compatibility isn't really an issue for MS: I don't expect any
changes at all in Quirks Mode. In Standards Mode they can make all the
standards conforming changes they want, despite breaking a few sites
stupidly relying on CSS hacks. Hacks were always discouraged by anyone
with a sane mind (so was DTD switching, though). My fear is nevertheless
that they once again think bug compatibility was important even in
Standards Mode.
Besides, if the GUI was fixed to what first screenshots indicate, that'd
be a far worse problem for users than CSS conformity.
