IE 7.0 Beta Followup
So, I’m late with this followup. Oh well. The IE dev team has publically stated what CSS fixes are going into IE 7.0. As I mentioned, there were no CSS fixes of note in beta 1. But I have to wonder what’s going on up there in Redmond.
On one hand, this is a very good thing. Web developers, myself included, have been clamoring for a public notice of what is going to get fixed ever since the IE team was re-formed. On the other hand, there is still a large number of things which are still missing; a correct DOM, particularly DOM Level 2 Events is notably absent.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m thrilled that I’ll be able to make more stuff work without hacking around retarded IE issues. But IE is way behind the times, and while IE 7.0 is a good first step, it’s still not going to be on par with, say, Firefox 1.5, which should be out around the same time.
Some of the notable omissions from the IE 7.0 fix list:
- Fixed DOM
- DOM 2 Events
- Modifying the DOM before the page is fully loaded causes an error
- Native SVG support
- XHTML user-agent support
If most of those seem to be JavaScript related… well, they are. And herein lies the problem. IE 7 will have much improved support for the techniques web developers have been using for years now. In Internet Time, that’s ancient history. The new wave of tech is arriving, and it includes: JavaScript (for actual UIs, not just page transitions and crap following the pointer), XHTML, SOAP/XML-RPC/XmlHTTPRequest, Atom, XSLT, XForms, CSS 3, and on and on and on. While Gecko-based browsers already support quite a lot of this, IE’s support is minimal. I’m sure that in the time between IE 7.0 and the next version, there will be plenty of new bugs found in IE’s implementation (if any) of these standards. In other words, the tech has changed, but the problem’s the same.
The announcement is also very strangely timed. You’ll notice that there is a laundry list of issues which have been corrected. But this announcement came two days after the IE 7.0b1 release. Why were only two fixes in b1? Were they able to make all those corrections in the two-day window between b1 and that post? I find this quite puzzling.