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Website Designers - Are you prepared for Internet Explorer 7?

October 1, 2006

The final version of Internet Explorer (I.E. 7), the successor to I.E. 6 is about to be released.

Even though Microsoft still maintains browser dominance since eclipsing Netscape in the mid-1990s, FireFox the Google backed “alternative” to Internet Explorer continues to soar in popularity….mostly due to persisitent marketing by Google and the fact that web-users are tired of security holes in I.E…..issues that will eventually affect FireFox as it gains a sizeable share in the browser market.

Currently the key difference between I.E. 6 and FireFox is that FireFox is more standards compliant and adheres to W3C guidelines more “tightly” than I.E. 6.

Internet Explorer 7 will be more W3C standards compliant and your HTML code will be subject to much more rigorous interpretation than is the case with IE 6, consequently some web pages that look fine in IE 6 might not look the same I.E. 7.

Some Statement(s) disputed by David Hammond (see below)

According to Adam McFarland: “One morning you open your email and your inbox is flooded with emails that your site isn’t working properly. Maybe your text or images don’t look right, or even worse maybe your site isn’t properly processing credit card transactions. How could this happen when you didn’t change a thing? Well, that morning could be the morning later this year that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.”

With this in mind and as a designer….are you prepared for I.E. 7?

Here some articles that examine this issue in depth:

1. - Preparing Your Site for Internet Explorer 7

2. - Web Standards, Browsers and Designing for the future

3. - White Paper by Richard Litofsky[PDF Doc] - Increase Website ROI by delivering a Flawless Web Experience To Every User

Get FireFox!

NOTES:

In an email message to me, David Hammond of Web Devout raised some issues about my article: Web Standards, Browsers and Designing for the future.

Here are his comments:

I’m the author of the web standards advocacy and resource site Web Devout.

I saw your article “Web Standards, Browsers and Designing for the future” and wanted to point out a number of errors I saw in it.

Quote: At present, a vast majority of webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not fully W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera.

None of the browsers listed above are “fully W3C standards compliant”.

The standards are very large and complicated and are constantly evolving and becoming moreso, and no browser will ever likely be able to claim full compliance. That said, Internet Explorer does have notoriously poor support for web standards, mostly because they didn’t touch their layout engine for half a decade while other browsers began paying increased attention to standards. I have a summary of standards support available at http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.php

Quote: Concisely what this means is that IE 7 will tend to interpret your web page code more scrupulously than before - previous versions of IE(version 6.0 included) are notorious for letting designers get away with tons of “bad code.”

This isn’t really the issue at hand. IE 7 doesn’t handle “bad code” (as in invalid markup or CSS) much differently from before. The major changes have been the handling of the valid code. For example, “width” and “height” are very commonly used valid CSS properties, but IE used to handle them incorrectly, allowing elements to expand beyond the defined dimensions when the contents were larger than the space given.

IE 7 handles this more correctly (although it still has other problems with the properties). So the changes haven’t so much been about the handling of invalid code, but the rules applied to the page from the code it reads.

Your discussion about doctypes is quite off. Doctypes are not designed to trigger different rendering modes. They simply describe what elements and attributes the web browser might expect to see in the document. For HTML, most browsers don’t even read the doctypes. They do, however, often follow a nonstandard legacy compatibility maneuver called “doctype switching” in which they attempt to guess whether or not the page was written in a time where browsers didn’t follow today’s standards. It just so happens that they look at how the doctype was written to make this guess. If the doctype is missing or uses an old or incomplete format, the browser might decide to deliberately apply a different default stylesheet and handle some CSS and JavaScript rules differently than they otherwise would. This is not what a doctype was designed to do; doctype switching is merely a “quirky” convention that Microsoft came up with after the fact and other browsers began to adopt. I have a list of which doctypes trigger which layout modes in major browsers: http://www.webdevout.net/doctype_switching.php

In short, Transitional does *not* necessarily mean quirks mode, and Strict does *not* necessarily mean standards mode. Also, most browsers will support transitional elements and attributes even when the webpage uses a strict doctype. This is a result of lots of sloppy webpage authoring in the past and browsers being overly forgiving.

On a final note, IE 7 doesn’t have anywhere close to the level of standards support offered by Firefox, Opera, Safari, or Konqueror. It has some improvements over IE 6 in some of the most pressing areas, but IE is still a significant source of incompatibility and it is far from safe to assume that a webpage rendered properly in other modern browsers will look even mostly right in IE 7. At this point in time, developers of all major browsers are really working hard, and it’s unlikely that IE, given its half-decade period of absolutely no platform development, can catch up to the competition that is still pushing steadily forward.

You are all welcome to table your comments!

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Web-Dev-Design 

Comments

One Response to “Website Designers - Are you prepared for Internet Explorer 7?”

  1. James Opiko on October 1st, 2006 1:45 am

    Prompted by David’s email message, I have since made some “language” changes to my article: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Web-Standards–Browsers-and-Designing-for-the-future/3408

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