I just read some fairly encouraging news on the Internet Explorer blog. They have a new entry up titled Standards and CSS in IE that details the changes they have / will be making to IE in the 7.0 release that will help to improve IE’s standards support. Some of the key items listed include fixes for:
# Peekaboo bug
# Guillotine bug
# Duplicate Character bug
# Border Chaos
# No Scroll bug
# 3 Pixel Text Jog
# Magic Creeping Text bug
# Bottom Margin bug on Hover
# Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
# IE/Win Line-height bug
# Double Float Margin Bug
# Quirky Percentages in IE
# Duplicate indent
# Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
# 1 px border style
# Disappearing List-background
# Fix width:auto
And support for some of these HTML doodads:
# HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
# Improved (though not yet perfect)
All of these should simplify the process greatly of creating CSS based web sites, but the question I have is….when will this help. First IE7 will have to be released, then it’ll take a while for people to actually go ahead and download it. As web developers we’ve been supporting old web browsers such as IE 5.5 for years, despite the fact that IE 6 has been around for so long. So while this is a great step and will certainly help to simplify development of web sites catering to the latest browsers, it won’t help for the others. Also of note…IE 7 will be available for Windows XP and Vista (formerly known as Longhorn), but not for Windows 2000. This may hold back a lot of corporate users as many haven’t had a compelling reason to upgrade to XP.
While I’m typically in full support of the adherance to standards, I must say that some of the w3c standards around CSS and HTML are quite unusual. The key one, that is so central to developing any CSS based site, is the box model. Man that’s a weird one. A box is 100 pixels wide and has 10 pixels of padding on the left and right - how wide is it? 120 pixels. I thought we said it was 100 pixels wide? Yeah, whatever. For most cases you can use the awkward w3c model (while brushing up on your highschool algebra), but certain scenarios make it quite nasty. How do I make a box that spans half the width of the page and has 10 pixel borders on the left and right? Without nested all sorts of useless markup, I don’t know.
Enough rambling!
September 8th, 2005 at 9:20 am
I’m very excited about the project as I just finished a design theme for csszengarden.com
You can have a look at http://www.celebrityblog.net/zengarden/zengarden-sample.htm
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:46 pm
IE7 still has the duplicate character bug. I am not sure what is triggering it but I was able to hack together a fix. If I simply add some spaces (on occasion I had to explicitly define the space with   ; ) the IE7 seems to duplicate the space instead of the characters; this could cause formatting issues which will have to be worked around but it is much better than extra characters being displayed.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
I think CSS is the leading web tool everyone should use.