Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Yippee... ? ::
Chris Wilson lead program manager for the web platform in MS Internet Explorer and a member of the IE team since the dawn of time (1995) back in Marchleaked hints about features in IE7. In guarded phrasing, like this:
He wrote:
[to Del.icio.us]
Chris Wilson lead program manager for the web platform in MS Internet Explorer and a member of the IE team since the dawn of time (1995) back in Marchleaked hints about features in IE7. In guarded phrasing, like this:
We know we have a lot more work to do in addressing our consistency issues with CSS and furthering our coverage of these standards. Expect to see more detail on our plans in IE7 in the future.He seems to promise that IE was becoming more standards compliant, particularly with regard to CSS. This would be great news, because having to hack Style Sheets so that they work both for standards compliant (more or less) browsers AND for IE has been a pain, and a barrier to wider implementation of a really good technology. More recently Chris gave a few details.
He wrote:
The first couple of things theyve done are:Now this is great news. Personally I am most excited about the CSS, I don't yet use PNG graphics, partly because of the different and dodgy ways different browsers render them, but CSS I now use "all the time", it is just such a clean neat and economical way of making things look right. So if IE removes its "major inconsistencies" and does give us "functionality on which we can rely" then we'll have taken a nice step in the right direction. However, I've been bitten by IE "inconsistencies" (read failure to provide basic support for 3WC standards) at previous new version releases. So, a cautious "Yippee!" ¶ 6:09 AM
- Support the alpha channel in PNG images. Weve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
- Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely.
[to Del.icio.us]
So many webpages currently use these technologies, giving us countless invitations to drop IE altogether...I look forward to the long-overdue updates, but I don't think I'll be going back from Firefox anytime soon.
