CSS Support Could Be IE7's Weakest Link

Ritalin16 writes "Many web developers may be disappointed to hear that Microsoft decided to hold off on full CSS2 support with IE 7.0. As said by Microsoft-Watch: 'One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.'" More commentary available from ZDNet. Generally related to the IE 7 Acid Test thrown down by Opera.

Well...

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Michael Cherry, senior analyst at Directions on Microsoft, said he believes the software giant's biggest focus will be on security issues with features and standards support taking a back seat.

I guess that's not THAT bad.. Sure it would be nice to have CSS2 support, but security seems to be the #1 thing everyone bitches about around here and is probably more important.

Then again, I can't really see why they don't do both...

Flawed logic

[wileynet]

We consider the standard to be flawed. So instead we will continue with our flawed support of the previous standard.

Wait till CSS2.1/3?

[critter_hunter]

What a load of crap! CSS3 builds up upon CSS2.1, and even though CSS2.1 is still a candidate recommendation, it's being pushed as the standard by the W3C (as evidenced by the fact they are linking to CSS 2.1 in the navigation menu of their CSS page [w3.org])

Of course, some people are actually in favour of IE not supporting CSS any better than it currently does - with IE7 being unavailable on platforms older than XP, and any attempted improvement to CSS being likely to add more than it's share of CSS bugs, it would just make another browser developpers need to work around. The evil we know might just be better...

Re:So...

[tabkey12]

Has anyone ever justified these claims that CSS is a flawed standard? In slashdotters experience, is CSS flawed, and if so, how?

Re:Flawed Standard?

[nightski]

What. Just because their products have their own flaws means they should adopt all technologies that are flawed?

back to explorer?

[sakri]

I just hope all those people who "defected" to firefox wont go "back to daddy" because "they've fixed it all"...

Stylesheets and MS

[phorm]

Didn't MS introduce their own "standard" for stylesheets at one point? Perhaps they're just gunning to introduce a new "MS standard" to blow off browsers using the real standard?

IE7 & Google

[tpengster]

Let's put two and two together:

• Google is gaining a huge foothold on the web. Alot of Google's new sites (gmail/maps/suggest) depend heavily on Javascript
• Microsoft decides to release a new version of IE

Perhaps the new microsoft motto will be "IE's not done till Google doesn't run"

This won't be a huge problem since Google can simply update their code. However, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of JS functionality that would be very useful to google either now or in the future is simply "missing" on IE7

There has been alot of talk of Google launching a new era of computing with the web as the OS. But Microsoft controls the web (through IE), and they won't allow the web to become a competitor to Windows.

Weakest link?

[smooth wombat]

I read the title and thought, "CSS will be IEs weakest link? Something doesn't sound right."

This sounds like typical Microsoft logic. "Just wait a bit longer and something better will come out." CSS2 is here now and people are using it. Support it instead of forcing web designers to put in loads of ugly hacks just to make your bloated software work as it should in the first place.

Yeah, I'm bashing Microsoft but it is deserved in this case.

Will IDN support be a bigger issue?

[NerdHead]

When Firefox, Opera, and other browsers got burned by the support for IDN and phishing exploits associated with it, IE looked good for not having IDN support. It will be interesting to me to see if Microsoft noticed it and will offer users a choice to turn off IDN support.

Firefox rendering engine for ie

[acomj]

Someone should make a ie "plug in" that handdles ccs. We have a couple open rendering engines (geko/khtml)..

Could this be done?

Re:Why I hate developing webpages...

[msoftsucks]

True. But the experience for IE users can be worse. On the page you can say, "Best viewed with Firefox" and then have a link to www.mozilla.org. M$ has been doing this crap for years. Maybe its time for M$ to get a taste of its own medicine.

CSS? Get HTML right first!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even CSS2 support - what are they thinking?
Perhaps they are too busy trying to fix their extremely broken support for the standard HTML button element (*not* input type="button").

Re:Easy solution

[drspliff]

Your damn right about Microsoft only supporting what it wants to support, an issue with PNG images has existed for years..

To get PNG images with an 8bit alpha channel (also known as super-cool translucent stuff for those of you that are non-technical), you had to use a microsoft specific CSS property that manipulated the DHTML/DirectX attributes of the image... All of that instead of just correctly implementing the PNG standard.

Without full support for CSS2, less and less web developers will be pushing the limits of what CSS2 can do (lets face it.. MS/IE still has the majority). Without a wide adoption of CSS2 the W3C won't be pushed as much to revise and improve CSS2 to create CSS3 (or an intermediate version)

As a web developer I'm seeing this as a major kick in the teeth from Microsoft, we've been waiting for years for a version of IE that actually works towards standards, instead of yet another botched implementation.

Hell, if they made IE 7 open-source i'd implement as much of CSS2 as a lone developer could, but thats just wishful thinking :)

Is it just me? Or am I seeing the whole Netscape/Microsof fiasco happening again, but with different players?

Flawed?

[Apathetic1]

I dislike CSS because it makes the most common layout formatting (columns) hard to implement. I also dislike that it has no inheritance. Just as an arbitrary illustration, I get sick of writing:

a {
some formatting
}

a.somestyle {
more formatting
}

a.otherstyle {
yet more formatting
}

instead of, say:

a {
some formatting

.somestyle {
more formatting
}
.otherstyle {
yet more formatting
}
}

Great concept, mediocre execution. This "flawed standard" garbage, however, is just a lame excuse.

Re:Why I hate developing webpages...

[earthbound kid]

Since IE doesn't support CSS 2, it's really easy to slap a "Get Firefox!" tag at the bottom of a page, then use CSS 2 selectors to hide it from browsers that follow standards. That means that if IE7 actually does support standards, visitors will stop seeing a warning to switch browsers on my page. And why not? If IE actually could render a page correctly, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. Until then, I'm keeping an FF logo on the bottom of the page and hiding it with CSS 2:

http://deadhobosociety.com/wiki/ [deadhobosociety.com]

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say that the biggest flaw is the majority of web pages have a column layout, yet there is no way of *easily* creating columns in CSS2. For that you have to go to a CSS3 working draft... which could change.

Angry as H.E.Double Hocky Sticks

[cythrawll]

I am a webdesigner.

And I am SICK of IE having half- CSS support. It is a struggle to contstantly hacking CSS to fit IE needs. I like my layouts to have some fire, some pizzaz. But if IE can't display CSS right, all my simple CSS ideas turn into ugly hacks so they display right in IE.

CSS 2 is flawed??? Since when is MS have the almighty power to judge W3C?? The Pot is Calling the Kettle Black...

ooh im steamed...

Re:So...

[tesmako]

All W3C standards are heavily flawed. One can in general say this much about the situation, if something (the WWW) has been around for >15 years, and despite this:
- The user experience is only so-so.
- The standards are so numerous that it is hard to even have a general idea where all fit into the big picture.
- Writing a reader for it is such a huge undertaking that not even the largest and most successful businesses manage to pull it off well then something has gone very wrong.
then something is wrong.

The WWW should have been able to stabilize at some level years ago, making it possible to actually make a browser with a reasonable amount of effort. The underlying problem is not that hard, it is just a continuos pie-in-the-sky standardization effort ripping everything invented at any point apart in the next revision since they have decided that there are some better way to do it.

People have at this point come to accept it as the way things should work (being worried when there is no new standard for a year or two), but this is really a hopeless situation. If we had actually reached any level of comprehensiveness as far as web-based applications were concerned it would be less to think about, but the web is still in a primitive state.

Consider this coders and software designers:
- Make a presentation format that separates content from layout.
- Allow textual information with embedded images and external plugins/objects.
- Include some basic scripting, some basic widgets (buttons, textfields, drop-down boxes).
- See to that it is decently easy to screen-scrape, use with screen-readers and is resolution independent (may be done by automatic switching of layouting information).

Does anyone really feel that this has to be so complex that one can't complete it in under 15 years and one can't make it simple enough to actually make it possible for a hobbyist to implement a reader for? Sure the W3C has standards for a lot more, but that is part of the problem, the core is too huge. If one had a simple core it would have been easy to throw in MathML later and get people to pick it up, but since it is hard to in any sense even finish the core who is going to have time to make MathML work?

Web standards need a big sanity check.

Not necessarily a policy

[fm6]

I think maybe we're stuck on the assumption that Microsoft is out to force its own technology on us, when they don't actually have that much control over events. The last time we talked about IE7, I made the assertion [slashdot.org] that CSS2 support was technically trivial. One guy came back with an interesting and thoughtful post [slashdot.org] pointing out the problems with IEs rendering engines and how proper CSS support would break a lot of web pages.

People tend to assume that every Microsoft action is part of some evil master plan. The truth is that they're stumbling around in the dark a lot. The software development effort is conspicuously out of control, and many of their projects are a total mess.

Alternative idea

[Quiet_Desperation]

Keep web sites simple and clean? Forget about the fancy crap and let me get to the information I need ASAP? Just a thought.

Does it have to be just IE7?

[mhesseltine]

Isn't proper CSS support one of the weak links in all of the Internet Explorer browsers? Even simple things like:

li { list-style:none ;}

used to create a navigation using list items for links (since the navigation is a list of links), displays fine in Firefox (anchors fill their block), but displays funny in IE (where the anchors fill their block, but with a gap on the left where the list marker would be)

Bottom line is, Microsoft has just shown, once again, that the only standard they care about is their own. Hopefully, the sheep who continue to support them will be shown the light, and learn that there are alternatives.

So they can hire some designers

[guet]

People have already done this for free - demonstrating huge file-size savings (translating directly to money for whoever runs this site, anyone there? !?), not to mention making it far easier to change the style of the site, adjust colours etc etc etc. I can't be bothered to dig up a link but there are several sites about it.

I imagine it's more to do with this :

the code base could be such a huge mess

Unrealistic MS prospects

[dantheman82]

There is a reason that deadlines are pushed back (repeatedly). MS is at this point such a behemoth and so ambitious in promises/updates, that I can pretty much guarantee something will suffer.

If CSS suffers on IE in favor of a more secure browser, that's 100% fine with me. If XMLHTTP is modified significantly, I will take serious issue, because I can see that as the future. And no, web devs are NOT being held back by IE's quirks, but rather few know how to code good UI on the web. Coding C/PERL is one thing...developing an intuitive UI is quite another.

I'm frankly more worried about MyLifeBits [msdn.com] as far as privacy and Indigo [microsoft.com] for security. But, with feature creep undoubtedly underway, this may be an issue in 2010 or so...

Re:time to spend some karma

[drew]

if by "adheres quite reasonably" you mean "enough errors on the main page that the w3c validator gave up and stopped counting after the first 50", then yes, slashdot adheres quite reasonably to HTML 3.2.

This Makes Me Want to Puke

[eomnimedia]

As a web developer, I am sick and tired of Microsnot knocking the standards instead of embracing them.

Other browsers have embraced Web Standards, the developer community has united and pushed for browser developers to embrace web standards, and yet Microscrap still doesn't get it. And so, I have to include in my CSS code "hacks" to get around IE's disobedience to the Box Object Model, etc.

So what do we do about it?

Boycott IE.

The Technical How-to:
Developers can exclude IE altogether by using Javascript to sniff-out IE, and only render CSS tags in non-IE browsers. Site visitors would still see content, but they would also see a "...this site boycotts IE because..." message that is normally hidden to non-IE browsers.

The Business How-to:
Show your project managers how much time is wasted trying to get an ordinarily simple design to work with CSS in IE. Then show them how easy it is in Firefox, Safari, and other "compliant" browsers. Then slam a copy of "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffery Zeldman on their desk and tell them to read it. (While we're at it, send a copy to Bill Gates and tell him he should read it too, the big fat...ahem....)

If sites everywhere were suddenly replaced with bland layouts for IE users only, and a message stating why, both Microsnort and users would get the message.

I know this will never happen because of business rules, because so much of the corporate world kisses Microshafts' butt, and for a gazillion more reasons, but still -- it feels good to get it off my pasty-white chest.

Re:What does CSS2 give you that is needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

My question was what is (if there is one) the killer reason for CSS2?

How about separation of display and content?

You just include basic tags in the markup (h1, h2, p, li, etc.), which tell you what the content is (heading, list, paragraph text), and use CSS to affect how it's displayed (font, color, background, graphics, etc.) - including things such as fold-out lists, drop-down menus, and other eye candy.

You can then alter the display without touching your markup (see here [csszengarden.com] for an example.)

Re:What is flawed with CSS2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Old Hungarian proverb:

When a girl can't dance, she blames the music.

Re:Flawed?

[Apathetic1]

I'll admit my example was contrived but I don't have a real example handy just now. I wish CSS had nesting because I find it unnecessarily verbose.

Re:So...

[Elwood P Dowd]

1. I have no idea if CSS is flawed, or what the problems might be with it.
   
2. According to Dave Hyatt [mozillazine.org], "Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain."

Yes, in that article some of his woes may have been caused by IE6 and lower, but IE7 will have to deal with the precedent set by IE6 just the same.

Re:Well, hey Microsoft -- I say F*CK YOU right bac

[gentgeen]

Kudo's to you -- Modd this one Way UP!!!

The beauty of this is its simplicity. It is a great way to show PHB's the fact the IE is flawed, and not all the other browsers out there. I would just add that you may want to have a plan for the PHB's arguement over the extra charge.

PHB: What is this $2,000 charge for?
Developer (pulling out 2 images of page without IE hacks): here is what your page looks like in IE, and here what it looks like in all other browsers.
Developer: (pausing for effect) And this would have only cost you X dollars.

I design webpages as a hobby, as an activity for enjoyment. (I am a High School Math teacher by trade) I have created (what I find) to be some wonderful designs, only to have them F'ed up by I.E. when I try to show them to a friend or colleague. Then spend hours fixing it in IE and trying not to break it in everything else. I have mostly given up on IE.

Well Of Course Not

[fupeg]

From TFA:

"It also seems that CSS support may be more important for client side work, and full or complete CSS support makes a thin client more attractive. This would seem to be counter to Microsoft's push for 'rich' clients."

Microsoft has always feared thin clients because they view them as a way for people to escape Windows. This is why they had to destroy Netscape at all costs [theregister.co.uk]. This is why they will *NEVER* embrace standards that enhance thin clients. Just look at their history. They've always tried to do just the opposite. Look at their proprietary JVM that succesfully took Java applets out of the web client picture. Look at their support for their own DHTML version. Look at their proprietary versions of JavaScript. Look at their proprietary extensions to XSL. And of course there is the mother of all standards-busters: ActiveX. These have all been ways to attack thin client standards, and they have been very succesful. Next up is XAML [ondotnet.com].

Even if they wanted to support thin clients and make IE better, they would not want to support standards. Why? Well as soon as they support a standard that allows websites to do more good things, then there will be websites that do these good things. If more websites do more good things based on standards, then suddenly it becomes a lot easier to switch from IE to Firefox or Opera, or for that matter from Windows to Linux or OSX. However, if websites can only get some "cool" functionality by using either ActiveX/DHTML/MSXML or by using CSS 2, then of course they will pick the MS option because there are so many more IE users. And of course that will make it impossible for users of said website to switch from Windows/IE to anything else.

They do own it.

[Auckerman]

"he only reason Microsoft doesn't support CSS properly is that they don't OWN it."

Considering Microsoft has sucessfully patented CSS [uspto.gov], I don't see how they don't "own" it. Even if they have given W3C a license [w3.org] to it.

fucking cunts

[t_allardyce]

Fuck that, i'd rather have a flawed standard followed to the letter on all major browsers than 10 totally incompatable half-hearted implementations of the same format making even simple tasks such as positioning a box on the screen a fucking nightmare. Microsoft should follow the standard in their 'strict' mode and do whatever they want in the other modes.

MS Moving Away from Browser-Based Applications

[eDavidLu]

The real reason why Microsoft does not fully embrace W3C standards is because they want to move away from browser-based application. This is also the reason why they let IE development go into the tank.

In the browser-based application model, MS does not control the desktop. They have competitions from Firefox and Opera. More importantly, MS also does not control the server. They have competition not only from Apache, but also Google, Amazon, eBay, AOL, and anyone who publishes a web application.

Microsoft's aim is to control both ends of a network application. And the way they are going to do this is to replace HTTP web servers with IIS and Exchange Server and to replace web browsers with Outlook. The .NET platform is just a step towards that goal. If you accept IIS/Exchange and Outlook as a server/client network application platform, there is no need for W3C standards. It also eliminates any competition, or at least make the competition dependent on Microsoft technologies.

Therefore, any effort that Microsoft expends into making "the web" more usable, such as CSS compliance and updates to IE, only enhances the browser-based application model and hurts Microsoft in the long run.

Re:So...

[masklinn]

CSS 2.0 (or even 2.1) being *so* unbelievably tough to implement is probably the reason why no one managed to create IE5.x and IE6 CSS "patches"...

oh wait, it's been done, and with only Javascript [edwards.name]

Rewrite large parts of the browser, yeah, right...

Re:So...

[masklinn]

So why are they supporting HTML?

They aren't, quite a lot of HTML4.01 elements are absolutely not understood by MSIE (, , table's , ...)
And IE6 has no understanding whatsoever of XHTML, be it 1.0 or 1.1, the only thing it can understand is XHTML served as HTML (aka relying on interpretation bugs to get your XHTML parsed as if it was HTML).

Or previous CSS versions?

They aren't either, even though MS claims full compatibility with CSS1 they only implemented CSS1 Core (and not even correctly), leaving out or misimplementing things like fixed backgrounds [meyerweb.com] or :hover pseudo class [meyerweb.com] (allowing it only in associations with anchor elements while it's supposed to work with any element), or plain and simply releasing a bug-ridden support [positioniseverything.net] as a rule of thumb...
yeah, CSS support indeed...

Re:Strategy from a Different Age

[superflippy]

The fact is that more and more people are getting to the point that they would rather write for everyone but IE rather than just IE.

True. I usually make sure a layout works in standards-compliant browsers first, then add in CSS hacks [w3development.de] to make it work in IE. For personal projects, if a particular feature (e.g. adjacent sibling selectors [w3.org]) isn't available in IE, IE users will just have to live without the extra pretty. For work-related projects, I have no choice but to implement bloated workarounds to mimic what should be simple style declarations.

Re:So...

[Carewolf]

Mozilla is more like 95%, besides counters are quotes, and white-space pre-line, pre-wrap.

Re:Heh

[asoap]

That is rather funny. I admit, that I do look like an ass. That's learn me to not think through my post.

I still stick by my statement though that CSS could be greatly improved. I think the way they are doing display is counter intuitive, and could be made much simpler.

But now, how do you go forward without creating legacy CSS?

Re:So...

[zonker]

it helps when the guy that invented css [w3.org] is also the cto of the company [opera.com]. :)

Re:Flawed?

[nautical9]

Thank you! That may be the single most useful CSS tip I've encountered over the past year. Unbelievable (and somewhat embarassing) that I haven't ran into in over 3 CSS books and countless CSS articles.

Is it actually part of the standard, and if so, any idea how compatible it is on the various browsers? (I did see your comment about NN4 and IE below, but I'm curious about Opera, Konq, etc).