IE7: Half a Loaf

ID: 050810.2033

In an August 1, 2005 article for CNET News.com, Next Explorer to fail Acid test, Paul Festa reports Microsoft's upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 will not pass Web Standards' Acid2 test that demonstrates whether a browser complies with desireable W3C standards for HTML 4, CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs. (The article reports "Apple Computer has already said that its Safari browser passes the test in preliminary builds." I tested Safari 2.0 that shipped with Mac OS X 1.4, and it does not pass the test.)

This is discouraging for several reasons, not the least of which is the W3C has moved beyond CSS1 to CSS2, and is working on CSS3. Failure to support CSS1 sets IE and any other non-compliant browser years behind the times, and unnecessarily complicates webpage design. When I reviewed Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos' 1997 book, Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web — it's now availablle in its third edition — I had to write "The bad news is, like HTML itself, no browsers support all CSS features. While Internet Explorer 4 and 5 support most of the W3C CSS1 and CSS2 standards, Netscape 4.5 supports less than half. Hopefully, the next version of Netscape will at least match Internet Explorer's support." Close to a decade later, IE has lost its lead to Netscape (Firefox), and most other browsers. IE went from the most compliant, to the least.

There is a glimmer of hope. As reported in Kevin Yank's DHTML and CSS blog, IE7 Beta 2 fix list posted, IE7 will provide support for the ABBR (Abbreviation) tag.

On May 25 and 27, 2004 I gave a talk to the STC (Society for Technical Communication), titled The Best Markup That Never Was, wherein I chided Microsoft for its lack of support for the ABBR tag, and incomplete support for the Q tag. On the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog, hosted by Chris Wilson, lead program manager for the web program in IE, I put it this way:

When I give talks about markup, I single out two failures of IE W3C compliance:

1. Failure to support CSS rendering for the ABBR tag. The current workaround is to either contain non-acronym abbreviations within SPAN tags, or use the semantically absurb markup of containing an abbreviation within an ACRONYM tag. (Acronyms are a subclass of abbreviations. Abbreviations are a superclass of acronyms.)
2. Failure to support CSS rendering of quotation marks for the Q tag. The only workaround here is to reference HTC files to provide this feature for IE without causing double sets of quotations in compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera, etc.

While the ABBR and Q tags may not be well-known or commonly used at sites like MSDN, they are critical for all literature-related sites where dialogue, for example, is a major portion of the content. (And, unbeknownst to most developers, other countries use different quotations delimiters than we do!)

Of course, every developer has their favorite gripe, depending on what IE prevents them from doing. The ABBR and Q tags are mine. I get half of what I wanted, which is better than nothing at all.

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