Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE, was
interviewed by ZDNet today and with great marketing finesse managed to completely dodge the whole standards compliance issue. Instead Chris talks about “standard improvements” or “improvements in our standards support in IE7”. I applaud the IE team here for the IE6 bug improvements found in IE7. However, what about actual standards compliance? According to the
IEBlog, the IE7 team has added support for.
- HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
- Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
- CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
- CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
- Alpha channel in PNG images
- Fix :hover on all elements
- Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body
Most of these added features still have issues, or caveats related to them. Slack, of course, should be given with IE7 still being in beta. Overall though even with these additions, standards compliance hasn't changed much in IE7. Web Devout analysis of both IE6 and IE7 confirms this. First let me say a semi-legitimate argument could be made saying Web Devout's numbers are biased towards IE. However I still think is fairly effective especially when comparing IE with itself.
| |
IE 6 |
IE 7 |
Firefox 1.5 |
Opera 8.5 |
Opera 9 |
| HTML / XHTML |
73% |
73% |
90% |
85% |
85% |
| CSS 2.1 |
51% |
55% |
93% |
92% |
95% |
| CSS 3 changes |
10% |
13% |
27% |
8% |
22% |
| DOM |
50% |
51% |
79% |
78% |
84% |
| ECMAScript |
99% |
99% |
Y |
Y |
Y |
As you can see, there really isn't much difference between IE6 and IE7 with regards to standards compliance. Most importantly, in my opinion, IE7 is still lacking:
- DOM Level 2 Events(Netscape Communicator had this in 2000!)
- DOM attributes are still broken
- No Javascript 1.6 support
- CSS :focus
- SVG support
However my list is quite short. There are
many more lists out better than mine.
I wouldn't go so far to say as IE7 is “just a bug release”. It is fairly close however. IE7 is still years behind most modern web browsers, and it hasn't even been released.
