RE: FW: IE Blog: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Daniel Glazman wrote:

> Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> 
> > Indeed it is! Congratulations to the IE8 team! Hooray! This is a
> > victory for the web!
> 
> It's going to be a bit tougher to tell the EU Microsoft's not willing
> to implement standards-compliant products, eh ?
> 
>    Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper
>    support for web standards in their products.
>           -- The Web Standards Project
> 
> </Daniel>

I think it is early days to say if IE8 is in any way standard compliant. I have seen the channel 9 video and there was a lot of mention of interoperability, standards compliance and passing the Acidtest2, but no hint about hasLayout or conditional comments or the other 1000 or so IE bugs. I am only new to CSS but in my small time in using it, I have discovered a multitude of bugs in IE7. There is a personal/work site on the web by a very well know CSS designer that has the IE7 Guillotine bug [1] showing in all its' glory on about ten pages on their site. Is this bug fixed in IE8? I don't know and when IE8 reaches beta or when it is shipped, will it be fixed? I sure this famous CSS designer would like to know if it was fixed. Such examples of the Guillotine bug would surely demonstrate one point in non-standards compliance to the EU commission. HasLayout doesn't come from the CSS specs. 

Then there are other parts of the specs where IE seems to support a property at first glance but doesn't fully support it under certain situations. The property clear with values of left, right and both seems to work quite well in IE, but with IE7 and earlier an element floated in one direction can not clear an element floated in the opposite direction [2]. Because this is a fact any layout involving floats and text like a child's story book can not be achieved in IE. It is one of many types of layouts that you can not use if you want to support IE.

When a site is coded just in IE it may break slightly in another browser but when a site is coded just in a standard compliant browser like FF2 sometimes there is total disaster in IE so until it is fully known if IE8 is standard compliant most of us are just walking in the dark and any comments supporting or not supporting the EU complaint is just guest work at this point of time.

[1] http://css-class.com/articles/explorer/guillotine/index.htm

[2] http://css-class.com/articles/explorer/floats/floatandcleartest1.htm


Alan

http://css-class.com/

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2007 17:12:44 UTC