Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Compliant

ReadWriteWeb writes "Microsoft's Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for IE addresses the issue of whether IE7 is CSS and Web standards compliant. Last week a Slashdot post claimed that IE7 was basically non-compliant with CSS standards. But Chris Wilson says that isn't true and that standards improvements is a big part of IE7. He admits that there were a ton of bugs from IE6 that have caused web developers a lot of pain, but says that IE7 will address those and be standards compliant. He goes as far to say that IE7 supports Web standards even at the expense of more backwards compatibility."

cut MS some slack

In addition to trying to be standards compliant Microsoft is dancing as fast as they can copying and adding the features virtually all other browsers have had around for years now.

From the article, MS (Chris Wilson) spots their compliance progress somewhere between 50 and less than 90%: Tough question, in terms of stating that we really do fully support the CSS 2.1 spec, it's hard to tell because there is a bias to any analysis. We're certainly somewhere between those two... I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though...

Not sure where that puts them in terms of compliance compared to the other browsers, but I'm happy to stick with Firefox for many reasons, recommend anything but IE7 to anyone for many reasons, and probably stay that way. IE7 from Microsoft is looking like a little too little too late.

In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility. In parts of the interview, Chris talks about trying not to alienate IE6 users (his mother) with changes to the "standards" behavior making IE6 sites not work or work differently, while in other parts of the interview he discusses being compliant "at the expense of backwards compatibility".

I don't know what they are doing with that, I'm not sure they do either. They made that bed. Now they're sleeping in it.

No

MS doesn't deserve slack.

There's only one standards compliance test that Microsoft has ever aimed to pass and that's their own.

Re:cut MS some slack

IE7 from Microsoft is looking like a little too little too late.

You know, I thought the same about the time IE 4 was in Beta.

Re:cut MS some slack

As an anonymous coward has already remarked, I was talking about the turning point for the browser wars.

At the time, I installed a late IE4 beta on NT 4 Workstation. After the obligatory shutdown it never booted again and I had to reinstall NT - this was before the days of Recovery Console or any of the nice rollback stuff that's present in XP. I figured if that was the kind of quality Microsoft considered late beta, Netscape had nothing to worry about. Boy was I wrong.

Re:cut MS some slack

Not sure where that puts them in terms of compliance compared to the other browsers, but I'm happy to stick with Firefox for many reasons, recommend anything but IE7 to anyone for many reasons, and probably stay that way. IE7 from Microsoft is looking like a little too little too late.

You mean the same way that Firefox/Mozilla was too little, too late after Netscape Communicator 4.x? The truth is that it is never too little, too late in the software world. If Microsoft delivers with IE7, and that's a big if, then they will likely regain some market share.

Re:cut MS some slack

Even if it does nothing for their marketshare, I would love to see IE7 be standards-compliant. Whether we like it or not, IE is bundled with windows and a lot of people end up using it by default. It hopefully would go a long way to getting websites to follow actual standards, not just MS standards.

Re:cut MS some slack

For example, a Slashdotter got a girlfriend, that's proof that anything is possible.

In Other News.....

Satan insists AntiChrist 50 - 90% like Jesus.... except better.

Quote from his blog

In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility.

Emphasis mine, changing the meaning a bit, but bear with me. If you read Chris Wilson's blog here [msdn.com], then you can see the following quote:

It's been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it's actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE.

Again, emphasis mine (not the caps, though, just the boldface). So - if it weren't for this Chris guy, CSS wouldn't even have been implemented in IE. If he's right, that says a lot about Microsoft. I tend to believe him here.

Ok, then he needs to cut US some slack

If - as is implied - he's the ONLY person at Microsoft who gives a damn about standards, then given the sheer number of standards that web browsers either would be expected to comply with or really should comply with, it would be utterly beyond the efforts of a single person to identify, prioritize, reify and program each and every single one of those standards.

IF he is being unfairly blamed, then he has my sympathy on that and that alone. But to turn around and say "hey, we ARE standards-compliant - give or take up to 50% on the standards I even know about" is not a way to win friends and influence people. If he lacks the time to even establish which parts of the specs are implemented, then he might be better spending his time on figuring that out -or- listening to those who have, rather than complaining that the reviews make him look bad.

He should also stop and bear in mind that since he himself states he does not know the actual level of compliance (he only thinks it is over 50%) then he has absolutely no grounds for complaining about other people's estimates. For that matter, the lack of knowledge on compliance would suggest that the browser is improperly tested. Standards compliance tests are not really optional, since they establish a list of well-defined behaviours for well-defined cases. At the very least, you want to be absolutely certain that those cases won't cause the browser to crash or go rogue. The only way to know this is to try them out. And if you're trying them out, you know which standards are met and by what amount.

Ergo, his uncertainty establishes firmly that testing and QA is somewhere between poor and non-existant, AND that Microsoft has no software with which to determine when the standards are met. His complaint of being a lone voice establishes firmly that these are not being fixed and never will be.

Hmmm.

Objective figures. Ok, here's the way to come up with an objective figure:

• For each non-interacting standard defined...
  
  • ...For each defined non-interacting element in that standard...
    
    • Test that element with each individual attribute definable for it, with each well-defined corner-case and with a random selection of invalid cases.
      
    • For every valid case that tests correctly, score 1 for complance. For every invalid case that is rejected safely, score 1 for compliance. For every test that causes the browser to crash, score 1 for instability. Unimplemented cases are always treated as non-compliance, even when optional. (The instability value starts at 1, not 0. A stable browser doesn't have infinite quality.)
      
    
    
  • ...For each defined interacting element, repeat the above test with typical, corner-case and invalid combinations that test every element - but not necessarily every permutation - at least once in combination with another element that it can interact with.
    
  • ...For a random selection of totally invalid tags, repeat the above test with a selection of short and excessive invalid tag sequences.
    
  
  
• Normalize the results by dividing the totals by the number of tests that have been executed and multiply by 100 to convert to a percentage.
  

For each interacting standard, apply the above test program for typical permutations and corner-case permutations, such that all interacting standards are tested at least once in combination with another standard that it can interact with.

Sum up the totals and divide by the number of standards and standard interactions tested.

Divide the total compliance by the total instability to get the overall quality.

Calculate the theoretical values that would be obtained for a browser that met only the required elements of the specification, as a fraction, to get the compliance threshold value. Determine the ratio of the total compliance with the compliance threshold to get the baseline compliance.

The overall quality of the browser will tell you how reliable the browser is, when trying to follow the standards as defined. The baseline compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the obligations of the specification. The total compliance will tell you how close the browser is to meeting the full specification.

It's a simple enough algorithm and is based on the usual testing procedures used by a million software engineers the world over. You test the typical, the corner-case and the error cases. In any specification, these cases are well-defined and should be easily tested.

Do these numbers mean anything? Yes. Due to the sheer volume of specifications out there, it is impossible to physically list every permutation that needs to be validated, but you CAN say what fraction of those permutations have been validated.

A superior method to this is to use an octal mask, where the value of each position represents the number of permutations (up to 7) that have been tested against a specific element, and each position represents one element. If you want to interpret half a screen of octal, go for it. It will give you more information, if you can process it, but will tell you less than the three suggested numbers will tell you unless you're prepared to do a lot of data crunching.

Re:Ok, then he needs to cut US some slack

Fair enough, but think about the situation for a moment. As an employee he has to take the company line. If he says to his boss, "we need to work on CSS support," and the guy says, "No, we need Tabs 2.0 to crush Firefox," then he has to work on that. Not only that, but he can't come out and say the truth. He has to exaggerate the standards improvement to hopefully quiet down the web developer crowd, while at the same time preparing the press release for all the new "user-centric" changes to IE 7. You might say he's a phony and a shill, but that anyone with any integrity would resign under such circumstances. But who would that help? We're all off with him as a standards advocate in an anti-standards company then if he just packed up and left.

Granted, this is just all speculation, I have no idea what the real situation is like. But it's always worth keeping in mind that spokespeople represent companies, and politics are huge anywhere, especially Microsoft.

Re:cut MS some slack

In the meantime, Microsoft almost seems tentative in their position about standards compliance versus backwards compatibility.

I don't understand why there has to be a conflict at all here, though. IE, like most other browsers, already has a quirks-mode/compliance-mode separation. Why not just go on doing the same old, bad job on the pages rendered on quirks mode, and then render correctly and compliantly on pages that specify proper DOCTYPEs etc.? It seems to me that the old "backwards compatibility" argument is just a bad excuse for Microsoft not to comply to standards.

Re:cut MS some slack

Why not just go on doing the same old, bad job on the pages rendered on quirks mode, and then render correctly and compliantly on pages that specify proper DOCTYPEs etc.?

Yes, it's true IE6 has a quirks mode and 'standards' mode, deciding which mode to use based on a valid doctype or not. However, the problem IE has now is that by following standards more closely in IE7 they potentially break compatibility with IE6 'standards' mode. Pages without a valid doctype can still be rendered as always by the quirks mode so they are not the problem.

Most of the problems will stem from all the inventive IE-targetted CSS hacks out there - tan hack, holly hack, star-html hack etc. that abused IEs improper understanding of CSS rules and will potentially break in IE7.

Acid Test

I wonder if the browser will pass the Acid Test [webstandards.org]....

Re:Acid Test

Question is, do they use Acid for measurement?

No, but the design team dropped a few tabs.

Re:Acid Test

Passing the acid test would be a nice feat, but not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it. And it isn't really necessary. IE7 does most of the things right that webdevelopers have always wanted to use but couldn't because IE6 owns the market. The box model implementation is sane now, IE7 does semitransparent PNGs (without requiring non-standard hacks), it supports :hover on everything, and so on. I've recently designed a new site from scratch and tested only with Firefox. Then I loaded the site with IE7 and I didn't have to change a bit. Right now the deficiencies of CSS itself are the biggest hurdle, second only to the legacy browsers.

I'm mad at Microsoft for leaving us in the cold for so long, but even though I hate the IE7 user interface, I think the rendering engine really is good enough. Just make sure that IE7 gets pushed to each and every IE6 user out there. No bullshit like restricting it to Vista or XPSP2 please.

Re:Acid Test

not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it.

Actually, gecko does pass it [nelchael.net]. The problem is that firefox 2.0 won't use that revision of the gecko core, only 3.0 will use it.

Now, even if current Firefox and future firefox 2.0 are not passing it, they're NEAR of passing it. IE7 rendering does not even look like a smiley [google.com].

I think the rendering engine really is good enough

Yeah, the software company number 1 of the world should be proud of shipping a widely used browser (IE is the most used application in the world) whose rendering engine is the worst one in the world, but that is "enought" only because IE defines what is "enought". If Firefox had 80% of market share, web developers would use lots features that IE does not even dreams to support until they ship IE8 in a couple of years. And nobody would use IE, because their engine is NOT "enought".

Re:Acid Test

to quote from the article
"I said on the IE Blog that in IE7 we were not going to pass the Acid2 test"
He goes on to note that a number of the things used in the acid2 test are to not likey to be high on their priorities and would be focusing on more widely used CSS.

Re:Acid Test

number of the things used in the acid2 test are to not likey to be high on their priorities and would be focusing on more widely used CSS

"Widely used CSS" is that tiny subset that works in IE6. Ofcourse nobody bothers using display:table-cell nor generated content when it fails in browser that 70%-90% visitors use, but these are very useful features.

Re:Acid Test

Translated, "we'll support the parts of the standard that we like." Bastards ... same old arrogant Microsoft.

Re:Acid Test

If you wrote C code like the Acid test, you wouldn't expect it to compile.

You would if the C standard explicitly required compilers to do so.

The fact is, it doesn't make much sense to compare CSS to C. One is an imperative programming language, the other is a declarative style language. You can't miss out bits of a C program and still have it work right, but CSS is designed around the idea that you can do just that.

I don't want to include a CSS 3 property in my stylesheet only to have every CSS 2 browser simply throw everything away, I want them to apply the CSS 2 properties they do understand and ignore the bits they don't. Fortunately, this is exactly what the CSS specifications require, which is why the Acid2 test includes invalid code - it's testing this part of the specification.

Re:Acid Test

Please do not spread this myth. It is simply not true. If you had actually read the Acid2 technical guide instead of relying on Slashdot hearsay, you would know this. From a previous comment of mine [slashdot.org]:

Have you actually bothered to read the Acid2 page? Because I hear this repeated all the time, and it's downright misleading.

There is a checklist of about a dozen things the Acid2 page tests. Incorrect code is just one of them. It is necessary to include incorrect code in a test like this. How else are you going to check whether a browser follows the CSS error handling rules?

It's incorrect code, sure, but it's incorrect code that has a defined rendering according to the CSS specifications. It's not something a compliant browser would trip up on. There is a correct way to parse the incorrect code, and the Acid2 page tests to see if a browser parses it correctly - among many other things it tests for.

Where are you guys getting this idea that the Acid2 test is all about error handling? It's a very small part of the test, but plenty of Slashdotters seem convinced that the test revolves around broken code and nothing else. Was there a weekly meeting I missed wher eyou all got this myth drilled into your heads?

Re:Acid Test

The post referred to in the article talks about how the developer thinks that the Acid2 Test is biased because the person who made it also has a page that says using IE is dangerous.
My thought is if IE people think that the Acid2 test is biased against IE then why don't they create their own standards compliant test page that works better in IE7(beta) than in Firefox or Opera?
There are tons of non-standards compliant IE-only webpages out there. It would be interesting to see a standards complaiant page where IE works better than Firefox or Opera.

Re:Acid Test

if a page is invalid, you shouldn't rely on standards compliant browsers to make things right.

You should if the standards in question explicitly require the browsers to do so.

As you are a web author, I assume you've written a CSS 2 stylesheet? Are you aware that most CSS 2 stylesheets are invalid CSS 1 stylesheets? And that it's the error handling defined in the CSS 1 specification that defines how your invalid code is handled in older browsers?

Do you plan on ever writing a CSS 3 stylesheet? Because if you do so, you'll be relying on the error handling defined by the CSS 2 specifications and implemented in current browsers. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do that safe in the knowledge that the browsers are going to behave in a certain way when faced with your invalid CSS 2 code?

That is the problem that the Acid2 test is trying to solve by including invalid code. Having invalid code handled correctly is an important part of ensuring forwards compatibility, because what appears to be invalid code to today's implementations could be perfectly reasonable code according to tomorrow's implementations.

Problem is even bigger than MS, it's monoculture.

Unfortunately not so simple. As long as web developers keep targeting their sites towards IE, it's a de-facto standard, regardless of its actual standards compliance. There are far too many sites out there which are broken when used on other browsers, because they are designed to work with the braindead way that IE wants things to be.

As long as one browser has such an overwhelming amount of marketshare, there will always be the temptation for the developers of that browser to do things differently than anybody else, and developers will neglect standards in order to make their site look a little better / flashier / faster than the competition, when viewed on that browser, by (ab)using its idiosyncrasies.

Microsoft is particularly bad at this, and has a history of being a poor citizen with almost every product that they've made, but ultimately I think you'd have the same problem with any browser that had 90+% marketshare. Since no piece of software is perfect, even a browser designed to be standards-compliant that was used that heavily, would have bugs in its rendering/interpretation of pages, which developers would begin to target, at the expense of other browsers.

Part of the problem is the developers who sacrifice standards compatibility, but the bigger problem is just one of having a monoculture to begin with. I'd prefer that Firefox have 90% marketshare than IE, because FF has a better security and compliance record, but I'd prefer that four browsers each have 25% than any single one have more than that.

Sounds familiar

"I'll respect you in the morning."
"I won't *** in your mouth."
"I'll pull out in time."
"We're gonna make this the most secure OS ever!"

Even Bush knows, "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, not gonna happen."

Guaranteed, 100%, that IE7 will be less standards-compliant than either Firefox or Opera.

Re:Sounds familiar

This is Slashdot. Your references are going to go right over everyone's heads.

"no official CSS test suite"???

Then WTF is http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ [w3.org] ??

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

Please quote properly. The full quote is "there isn't an official test suite that exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not." And that is true. A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant or to what degree an implementation is compliant. It can only point out particular things that are broken. If you're thinking of dividing the number of passed tests over the number of total tests, that still won't tell you how compliant an implementation is because it will be weighted according to the number of test cases for each particular language feature. If you weight them differently, then you let your own opinions about what is important into the analysis, which is why he followed up with "And any analysis you can do is going to be somewhat biased."

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

No. Not even close. Throw away the idea that he's arguing that Internet Explorer 7 is standards compliant. It's a complete fabrication; he never claimed that.

What he is saying is that they've done a lot of work in the area of standards compliance, there are moderate improvements, and that it doesn't really make sense to say that it supports 57.324% of the specification or whatever kind of number you can come up with, because there's really no sensible way of measuring something like that objectively.

Chris Wilson isn't a marketer, either. He's worked on Internet Explorer for years, he was on the W3C CSS working group and has his name in the acknowledgements of the specifications. I believe him when he claims to be working hard to bring Internet Explorer into compliance, but there's only so much a person can do without support from above.

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

"...exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not."
A test suite cannot tell you if an implementation is compliant

Yes, it can. If the question is boolean, then the test pointed to by grandparent definitely can give an objective answer. Currently, every browser I know of would fail, but it can give an answer.

or to what degree an implementation is compliant.

Yes, it can. It can give you a consistent answer on the number of passed and failed tests. That number may be biased for a given single run, but it can give a consistent answer, so it can be used to test relative compliance. It may give a fuzzy response that is open to interpretation, but I would bet that when testing different versions of the same browser, the answer would almost always be clear. It would be something like this:

IE6: Passed; 77. Failed; 39.
IE7: Passed; 92, Failed; 24.
IE7 Relative to IE6:
Passed in IE6, Failed in IE7; 2.
Passed in IE7, Failed in IE6; 17.

"One of the things I said in my post is that I think it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have an analysis of exactly where we are as a number with supporting or complying with CSS"

Actually, it's easy. There's an example of the numbers above. Are the numbers fuzzy? Yes. Does it provide, "an analysis of exactly where you are"? Yes. It is, "an analysis" and it is based on "exactly where you are." Is the result fuzzy? Of course. Every test of every human endeavor in history has either had a loose question or given a fuzzy result. Now stop being a sissy and answer the damned question.

"we really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements. That was really the largest focus of our platform work overall."

If that is the case (though when someone uses "really" twice in two sentences without providing supporting evidence I think he doth protest too much), and this guy really is involved in the project, then he should have those numbers tatooed on his inner thigh. If CSS and HTML compliance really was the largest focus of the largest software company ever, he would at least be able to say something. He would be able to say, "I don't think these numbers are perfect, but here's what we get on the official test suite."

If MS really were focusing on those tests, even if he really believed that taking number passed over number failed was such a great injustice, they would have those numbers printed in 120 point font and hung on the wall of the developer area. He could have said, "Well, I can't give you a percentage, because percentages are inherently subjective - they weight every test the same which does not necessarily reflect the value of each test to the total user experience. And though the results are subjective, the tests are objective, and we track them like a hawk. Hey - we're the biggest software company in the world. Software loves tests. So, while I reiterate that these numbers are't perfect, I can tell you that IE7 now passes 17 tests that IE6 did not, and failed 2 that IE6 passed, using the W3C's standard set of CSS 2.1 tests. You can get the specific list of test results at www.microsoft.com/ie7-css-test/."

Or he can say none of that, and I will remain unclear on Microsoft's current view on standards. I won't claim that I know them to be as bad as they have been, simply that what this guy says is sound and fury signifying nothing. Which is all that GP was saying.

He claims that this particular course is their "largest focus", a course which they have repeatedly faltered from, with apparent intent, in the past. He says there is no way of providing a number, without even acknowledging the existence of the official set of tests. Not even to say they suck. Either he doesn't know they exist, or he doesn't feel they are important, or he feels the results would leave the audience nonplussed. The one thing we can say for sure is not the case is what he is implicitly claiming; that they are deeply interested in passing the tests,

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

If the question is boolean, then the test pointed to by grandparent definitely can give an objective answer.

It can definitely prove that something is non-compliant. But it cannot definitely prove that something is compliant. A hell of a lot of bugs only manifest themselves in unusual circumstances. Unless you have prior knowledge of these bugs, you'd have to be very lucky to coincidentally trigger them with a simple test case.

It can give you a consistent answer on the number of passed and failed tests. That number may be biased for a given single run, but it can give a consistent answer, so it can be used to test relative compliance.

No, it can't. Suppose there are a hundred testcases for selectors and five testcases for a particular float configuration in wide use on the web. By adding support for more selectors, a Microsoft engineer might pass twenty more testcases, but introduce a regression causing them to fail the five really important float testcases. By your standards, this would be more compliant, even though it would be considered a disaster in terms of compliance.

It doesn't make sense to judge compliance by the number of testcases passed. There isn't a good way of assigning a particular number to how compliant an implementation is. But the real question is why should there be? Does anybody really gain anything by saying that Internet Explorer is 53% compliant instead of 52% compliant? Or does it make more sense to talk about particular bugs and particular features that are supported? I can see how the former might be of use if all you want is a number to criticise Microsoft with, but as a web developer, I can tell you that having a percentage just isn't useful in any way if you are genuinely concerned with practical matters and not political ones.

If MS really were focusing on those tests, even if he really believed that taking number passed over number failed was such a great injustice, they would have those numbers printed in 120 point font and hung on the wall of the developer area.

Do any other browser developers provide a running count of how many CSS testcases they pass and how many they fail?

Either he doesn't know they exist, or he doesn't feel they are important, or he feels the results would leave the audience nonplussed.

Or he thinks the same as I do; that such numbers are unimportant and misleading.

Re:"no official CSS test suite"???

That's actually kinda neat. So far, of the seven tests I've run, Firefox 1.5.0.6 has passed one of them.

For the curious:

• float 0 [w3.org] - Fail
• The Height of Lines 0 [w3.org] - Fail
• The Height of Lines 1 [w3.org] - Fail
• The Height of Lines 2 [w3.org] - Fail
• The Height of Lines 3 [w3.org] - Fail
• Inline Elements 0 [w3.org] - Fail
• vertical-align 2 [w3.org] - Pass

Some time when I have more time, I'll have to go through all of them and see how Firefox does.

More like 6 out of 7

when you install the AHEM font [hixie.ch] six out of seven pass.

Re:More like 6 out of 7

It would have been really nice of the W3C to mention that somewhere in the test suite. Unfortunately they neglect to mention that in the test suite, on the test suite "home page," and in the test suite documentation. They even neglect to offer a full download of the suite (you can use wget for that).

Even their own test suite documentation [w3.org] neglects to mention the font requirement. In fact, the only place they mention it is on the test authoring guidelines [w3.org] which is not something I'd expect to read when just running tests.

If I get the time, I think I'll try and bundle the test suite up WITH the Ahem font and try and run it again. Maybe even use the CSS font-embedding extension so you don't actually need to install the font.

But I can see why people may not like that test suite. Without a "full suite download" it's a bit of a pain to use.

Pesky problem

IE7 still has the pesky problem, even after all the patches and rewrites, of being Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Standards Compliance at Cost

One major issue is that many sites do not render as nicely in IE7 as they do in IE6. This is going to be a headache for IT managers and marketing managers for quite some time...

and for the love of money, think of all the FrontPage sites...

Re:Standards Compliance at Cost

if they hadn't been retards and used microsoft-hax and used standards compliant multi-browser html/css and javascript they wouldn't have a problem.

in otherwords: it's their own fucking fault, you code to a vendor-specific set in a non-vendor-specific world you're subject to the whims of that vendor

In other news....

Microsoft changes Web Standards to comply with IE7.

Re:The irony

Except that it isn't over 80% any more. The latest stats I saw (July 2006 I think) put IE at 73-75% and falling - still very high, but not nearly as dominant. Certain markets (universities, for instance) have much, much lower rates.

IE7 may change that, as many recent Firefox converts may switch back when it comes through as a security release. The real wildcard though is just how much marketshare Apple is really capturing - IE will never again be available for Mac, and if they (Apple) are to be believed, they had something like 15-20% of the laptop sales marketshare last quarter (or month...too many stats!), and are growing. It may be a case of too little, too late, but with Vista and Leopard we could see a swing in browser marketshare not seen since IE trounced Netscape.

Too easy to debunk

Someone, or more likely several someones, will independantly enumerate every area of non-compliance that exists in MSIE7. (Has it been released yet? I haven't seen an installation for Linux yet... I have MSIE6 on my Linux laptop thanks to some very clever script writers: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html [tatanka.com.br])

That said, I have read where even Firefox isn't yet 100% compliant. I'm usure of how much difficulty that causes web developers though. Actually, I don't know much of anything about the web except that I use Firefox pretty exclusively. If MSIE7 was made at least as compliant as Firefox, it would actually kinda bother me as it would give me a lot less leverage to keep my Firefox deployment where I work.

-1, Flamebait

What a ridiculous, misleading title. Microsoft have claimed nothing of the sort. They've claimed improvements, which is true. In fact, the article quotes Chris Wilson as saying he thinks they've implemented over half of the CSS 2.1 specification, but not 90%. That's hardly insisting it is compliant, is it?

I'm definitely no Internet Explorer fan - I think Microsoft's efforts with Internet Explorer 7 have been abysmal. But this is a non-story. Everybody knows that Internet Explorer isn't compliant. Everybody who has been paying attention knows that there have been gradual but long-demanded improvements included in Internet Explorer 7.

Shame on you Taco for posting a story with such a dishonest, inflammatory headline. If this were a political website, the equivalent to what you just did would be a Democrat posting a story saying "Dubya eats babies!"

Mod the original article ...

It's a shame we can't Mod the original article the way we can Mod the comments.

This one deserves a score of "+5 Funny".

Goes so far?

He goes as far to say that IE7 supports Web standards even at the expense of more backwards compatibility.

Unless IE7 is able to recognize non-compliant sites and render then differently, of course begin standards compliant is going to hinder backwards compatibility. That's the whole point, IMO -- when/if IE7 becomes standards compliant, all those broken websites will have to be fixed because they are no longer renderable by IE.

I look forward to the day when web developers won't have to develop multiple versions for multiple browsers.

50%?

Really, 50% compliant is 50% non-compliant.

If your project can't meet at least 75% of it's goals, it's a complete failure. Anything less than 90% compliance is pathetic.

To put it simply, it's ok to have bugs on some of the obscure parts of the specification, but as long as IE7 still fails on the routine every day uses of CSS, it's garbage.

Puff ball interview

Now, I'm all for IE improvements. As a web developer with a large number of IE based users, any improvement to IE and its standards adoption is a good thing. But this interview read more like a fan boi in a dev shop that a journalist looking for answers. Especially this question:

Richard: To clarify then, you're saying that with IE7 you're hoping to support as many of the CSS Web standards as possible, while also having that backwards compatibility. That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?

Did the interviewer have to remove his face from the interviewees crotch to ask him that question?

-Rick

Hilarious

FTA: "One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure."

Their html editing control is crap crap crap. I'm talking about the control thats been used in Outlook 2003, MSIMN/Outlook Express etc, I assume the interviewee is too.
* It is very easy to get paragraphs that are indented to the right. Yet it can be absolutely impossible to remove the indentation and align the paragraph with the rest of the text in the email. I suspect it barfs when it has to deal with nested tables.
* Deleting some text or formatting can drastically alter the following paragraph.
* You can read in perfectly valid html then it refactors it into gibberish.

Anyway its absolutely effing hilarious that they think its a strong html editor control.

Fixing the fix

He admits that there were a ton of bugs from IE6 that have caused web developers a lot of pain, but says that IE7 will address those and be standards compliant.

By this, he doesn't mean that they're fixing the compatibility- far from it. By this, he means that they're closing up the holes in IE6 rendering that previously allowed developers to "hack" around IE. Since IE6 would or wouldn't recognize something it shouldn't or should, respectively, one could make one style sheet that contained CSS for both IE and FireFox, using various methods (such as inheritance) to hide CSS from IE. (I believe we've already had articles about IE7 Beta breaking websites created for IE6.)

(Granted, the best way to do it is to set up a broswer check and use a different CSS file for each browser. But when you have a tiny website, you don't really care to futz with it.)

This effectively means that when IE7 comes out, all the hacks made for IE6 will break, and many pages created by that "cousin in high school" will suddenly look like rubbish.

Of course, those that were made predominantly for FireFox and Opera will still continue to work unabated.

Ummmm....of course

He's a spokesman for Microsoft, a company trying to move a product. What is he supposed to say? "No, our browser sucks. It's not standards-compliant in the least bit. Have you tried firefox?"

A corporation claims their product is better than it really is. Wow. I'm shocked.

Expanding Box Bug

From Chris' Blog [msdn.com]...

... Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help which is why we have a public bug database....

Last I heard IE7 does not fix the Expanding Box Bug [positioniseverything.net]?

This is a troublesome bug when you're populating DIV tags with generated data. You don't even have to be doing anything advanced.

Microsoft knows about the Position Is Everything [positioniseverything.net] Explorer bug list. I've seen IE engineers mention it on their blogs. So I don't buy the "we don't know of specific bugs" routine. And if he wants more concrete bug reports after that set, then theres the Comparison of Layout Engines [wikipedia.org] page which goes through the CSS specs in detail. I'm sure Micrsoft has fixed a bunch of those since IE6, but there are outstanding issues in IE7.

Most software engineers would pay large sums of money to have that type of detail in bug reports. Microsoft is getting that for free, but he is complaining that he does not have solid cases.

Re:Expanding Box Bug

Actually, I just visited that link with IE7, and it rendered the page identically to Firefox. So yes, they have fixed that bug.

They are bowling googlies again!

One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure.

This is the key folks. So many corporate database products rely on IE as the rendering engine. If the backward compatibility is lost, most corporations' will see their Crystal Reports, and other SQL engines that use IE as their GUI/renderers will be broken. They will never allow that to happen. So they will sacrifice the standard compliance.

Of course they will claim their concern is the "not spoiling the user experience" of their old moms or breaking millions of websites. But the real concern is that all these products should continue to use IE as their rendering engine. Their hold on corporate desktops through MS-Office and IE is too dear and profitable for them to compromise.

Translations from the managerese

"We really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements." Translation: Our work on CSS and HTML is incomplete.

"In IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards." Translation: we are not committing to being compliant with Web standards.

"We certainly spent a bunch of work trying to improve our standards support." Translation: We're over budget on standards support.

"I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though." Translation: we're not compliant.

"Well as you saw I got a little frustrated with the Slashdot post." Translation: I can't point to factual inaccuracies in the Slashdot post, but I sure don't like the spin.

"The target for that was not just passing any one particular test." Translation: We don't pass that particular test.

How about MS Korn shell?

This Microsoft insisting that they are standards compliant always reminds me of another time they insisted that they were compliant to some standard, and got completely embarassed:


I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation
Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this
week.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and
I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at
all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will
appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was
holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix
style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to
leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The
product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing
Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed
and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products
(like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not
well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room
and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their
choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that
are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should
be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very
compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in
the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and
should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a
bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the
MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now
Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one
of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM
lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable
confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality
collides with everyone elses?

Acid2 Test

IE7 beta2 fails miserably on the Acid2 test [wikipedia.org], however Opera 9, Konqueror and the new Webkit for Safari do perfectly. Firefox does pretty well, with only a minor glitch. IE7 fixed the most embarassing IE CSS bugs, but didn't make major strides towards being more compliant. On the other hand, there are some major improvements in IE7, for instance no more need to have a shim frame to block controls from showing through other DIVs.

Other quotes from the article

"IE7 is Standards Compliant"

"These aren't the droids you're looking for"

"You can go about your business"

Slashdot shouldn't have posted a year-old story

The fact is that /. embarrassed itself last week by posting a year-old story by Thurott on IE7 beta 1's CSS compliance. That slashdot has refused to apologize for or even admit to this error in judgment speaks volumes regarding slashdot's credibility (lack thereof) regarding MS stories. But then, what do you expect from a site that uses childish Borg-Gates and Cracked-Windows icons for MS and Windows stories (while all other topics have editorial-free icons and/or the official logos of the companies involved)?

Here's an interesting and educational video on the improvements IE7 has made over IE6 wrt CSS support:
IE7's CSS support [msdn.com]

Standards checklist

Only runs on Windows - check
apple-like icons - check
Tosses bs errors on competetitor sites - check
runs viruses quietly - check
ignores CSS specs MS doesn't use - check

what's the problem?

Content-Type: microsoft/knows-best

But is it yet HTTP-compliant? Specifically, does IE 7 treat the Content-Type header provided by the server as authoritative [gla.ac.uk] as required by RFC 2616 Sectino 7.2.1 [w3.org]?

I'm sick of sites that, say, put up a Linux boot CD up as a .iso file and don't configure their website to treat *.iso as application/octet-stream and serve it as text/plain, but I hate even more that Internet Explorer will download the file to disk where all HTTP-compliant browsers will properly render the ISO file in the browser window as plain text, resulting in the server never being reconfigured to serve the file as the proper type because the person who set it up only tests with IE!

It comes down to the definition of "standard"

A standard is, by its nature, a "common ground", something that is supposedly the agreed basic form of something. And, well, depending on how you want to define "standard", the browser can very well be "standard compliant".

If you take the webpages-that-are as a standard, and not the (let's be honest here, quite artificial) requirements of the W3C, it's well within the limits of possibility that the IE7 is sufficiently close to standard. It does display "everything" correctly.

Webpages and browsers are deadlocked against each other in a need for compatibility. If your page doesn't look right with IE, it is not right. NO matter how conform you are with the standard. People will go to your page, see that it isn't displayed correctly with their IE and they will go, thinking you have no clue. Yes, you're W3C standard compliant, yes, you didn't do anything wrong, no, IE won't display it. Thus it is YOUR fault in the eyes of the user, because "everything else" works with the IE.

The real standard is made in the real world by real people using real webpages (well, as real as webpages get). Yes, it would be nice if standard would mean that people know about the W3C standards and that they blame the errors in the way their browser displays a fully standard compliant page on their faulty browser. Unfortunately, it works differently.

So if you define standard as "the way the vast majority of webpages on the net work", then the IE is by definition standards compliant. Webmasters all over the globe go out of their way to carter to the quirks and flaws of the IE.

$title ~= s/Compliant/Complaint/

Microsoft Insists IE7 is Standards Complaint

That would have been the greatest typo evar...

not to mention a truer assertion for M$ to make. ;)

Slow Microsoft

Poor, poor Microsoft not being able to get a browser that meets 1998's standards by 2007. As the article pointed out, it takes years to get it right. Of course, if they hadn't let MSIE rot to begin with, they'd be okay now.

As it stands, it's already been demonstrated that:

• Large, well-organized open source projects (Mozilla [mozilla.org]) can do it.
• Well-organized corporate / open source collaborations can do it (Safari [apple.com])
• Smallish companies can do it (Opera [opera.com])
• and even guys-in-their-basements can do it (iCab [www.icab.de])

Microsoft, one of the largest software companies in the world, is trying to claim they don't have at least equal development muscle to these groups?

Seriously, the problem is of their own making. Now they're trying to fix the biggest bugs in IE6, but they're ignoring some of the biggest features of CSS that it lacks (like display: table*). It's hard to feel any sympathy.