Tag archive for ‘internetexplorer’
Molly Is Fixing Ur Standards
As some of you already know, Molly E. Holzschlag has signed a contract with Microsoft to work on standards and interoperability issues at the Internet Explorer team. Now she's getting ready to leave for Redmond and start her work on... what exactly?
Molly needs to do some prioritising and kindly asks the community of Web professionals for their help. What would you like her to focus on?
- Work for IE.next compatibility
- Train internal Microsoft folks on standards
- Travel around and evangelize standards and interoperability
- Write and edit more materials about standards
There are already dozens of comments on her website (including mine) but I want to repeat my opinion here.
It's a hard decision, actually, since all four points are extremely important. Given Molly's background and knowledge, however, I think that option 3 is the best. Evangelizing Webstandards and training interested people is what Molly can do best and was she has the most experience with. There are several core teams at Microsoft that need to understand Webstandards and the need for semantics on the Web. If these core teams understand the need for these things, there are others who can take care of implementation details. Evangelizing and micro-educating will, in my opinion, be the best approach.
Let's hope Molly will get the chance to change a lot in Redmond and get more folks interested in Webstandards. Go Molly!
Tagged as IE.next, internetexplorer, microsoft, webstandards+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Apply CSS to IE7 only
CSS hacks for browsers typically either exploit a flawed implementation or the complete lack of an implementation of a certain feature in the rendering engine. Most webdesigners know about the relatively poor level of web standards support in Internet Explorer and have tried for years to find workarounds for the most grievous bugs. However, exploiting software bugs to create a hack is quite dangerous because software gets updated and old flaws are fixed.
When Microsoft introduced conditional comments with Internet Explorer 5, a lot of problems were fixed. One could use constructs such as
<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
#myID {
background-color: red;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
to tailor CSS styles to Internet Explorer only. No other browser would parse anything in those conditional comments.
Conditional comments have a lot of drawbacks, though. Most problematically, they require changes to the actual HTML source since there is no equivalent to conditional comments in CSS. They also don't work well with XSL as Dave Shea has pointed out. This is why most web developers turned to the less reliable technique – the exploitation of browser bugs – to target specific browsers in their stylesheets.
Tagged as css, design, hacks, html, ie7, internetexplorer, xhtml+ Categorized as Uncategorized