Internet Explorer 7 Tips For Webmasters

January 31, 2007

By: Andrea Butterworth of BraveNet.com

In this Andrea discusses Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 7, and takes a look at some of the fixes, new features, as well as some tips on transitioning your web site to work as intended in both IE6 and IE7.

Internet Explorer 7 - what’s the deal?

As most of you probably know…IE7 was released on Oct 18th of 2006. It is delivered as a forced update that comes in through your windows updater. Why is this update significant? Internet Explorer has had a history of poor CSS support and poor compliance with W3C standards, meaning that in order to achieve some CSS effects it was necessary to implement ‘hacks’ that would not pass validation with the W3C. It was long anticipated that a new version of this browser would address many of these issues. While the Microsoft developers network (MSDN) states that they have implemented a lot of fixes and new feature support, they admit that IE7 still does not provide complete compliance. One of the problems of making so many changes to this browser is that now pages that worked in IE6 are broken in IE7. We are going to discuss the changes to IE7, how to transition your pages from IE6 to IE7 and a few other bits and bobs.

What is different in IE7?

MSDN states that there have been over 200 changes released with this version of their browser including fixes and new features.

The following bugs have been addressed:

Peekaboo Bug
Internet Explorer and Expanding Box Problem
Quirky Percentages
Line-height bug
Border Chaos
Disappearing List-Background bug
Guillotine Bug
Unscrollable Content bug
Duplicate Characters Bug
IE and Italics
Doubled Float-Margin bug
Duplicate Indent bug
Three pixel text jog
Creeping Text bug
Missing First letter bug
Phantom box bug

To view more specific details on these bugs visit the MSDN blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/22/712830.aspx

You will also find a comprehensive list of other bug fixes, new implementations, and features from CSS2.1.

Now that IE7 is out my pages are broken:

First of all let’s just make sure that we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot. Don’t throw out your stylesheets! Some people haven’t been upgraded to IE7 yet or may be blocking the upgrade. Since you already went to all of the trouble of finding work-arounds for those bugs, keep your stylesheets and use this code to display the correct stylesheet depending on which browser your visitor is using.

One easy way to detect if the user is browsing with anything less than IE7 is by using IE conditional comments.

[code lang="php"] < !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" > < html > < head > < title >My web page title< /title > < link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="your_normal_styles.css" mce_href="your_normal_styles.css" / > < !-- Will only be read by IE versions less then IE 7-- > < !--[if lt IE 7] > < link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="your_IE6_styles.css" mce_href="your_IE6_styles.css" / > < ![endif]-- > [/code]Only IE will recognize this ( etc …). All other browsers will read this as a comment and ignore it.

Hopefully, as a good developer, you developed for more browsers than just Internet Explorer. If this is the case, your transition should be much less painful as any hacks you have employed were probably for IE6 and you can simply move them to a stylesheet that loads only when that browser is visiting your site.

Visit the MSDN page on “Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7” and scroll down to see some other ways of transitioning your pages.

A couple of other tips on using IE7

It’s a problem. Microsoft’s IE7 forced update replaces IE6 completely so how do you ensure that your pages will work in IE6 if you can’t use it?

There are several ways to do this.

If you haven’t already installed IE7 use tech-recipes.com instructions to stop the one from overwriting the other. Another option is to install a stand alone version of IE6.

Note: Running a stand alone version of IE6 is not just that. Some functionality may be lost. For example some people note the inability to use cookies with the stand alone version.

The method recommended by the MSDN is to run IE6 via a virtual environment and they are providing a free download package of this for developers. Here’s the catch… for some reason Microsoft has decided to “time bomb” the virtual environment for April 1 which means that it will no longer work after that date. In addition people have reported that it is resource heavy and may slow down your machine.

To make a decision on what to do and how to do it, try reading Running IE7 and IE6 at the same time: Windows and Mac, the comments at the bottom are informative as well.

A general tip on getting used to the new browser -> visit the quick reference guide for keyboard shortcuts and other useful information on IE7.

Good luck everyone!

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment

The end of Google bombs?

January 31, 2007

Google bombs have become a problem for Google. The official Google webmaster blog recently had a statement about Google bombs and how Google deals with them.

What are Google bombs?

Google bombs are Internet pranks. Google heavily relies on the number and the type of links that point to a web site. If many web sites link with a special search term to a web site then the linked web site will get a top ranking on Google for that search term.

Some people abused this behavior of Google’s ranking algorithm to get web sites to the top of the search results that normally shouldn’t be there.

It works like this:

A webmaster decides that a web site should have a top Google ranking for a special search term. The webmaster links to the web site with that search term and asks all of his friends to also link to that web site with that special search term. His friends also link to the site and they ask their other friends to link with that search term to the web site, and so on.

Now that many different sites link to the web site with that search term, Google thinks that the web site must be very relevant for that search term.

The most famous Google bomb is the miserable failure Google bomb. For several months, the official home page of George Bush was the first result on Google for the search term “miserable failure“.

What did Google do about the Google bomb problem?

Last Thursday, Google decided to do something against Google bombs:

“These pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. [...]

So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

That means that most Google bombs shouldn’t work anymore. The new algorithm is probably an extension of the algorithm that detects unnatural linking patterns.

What does this mean to your web site?

Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google. It’s important to optimize your web pages so that they are relevant to a special search term but it is equally important — if not more important — to get high quality links to your web site.

A web site can only get high rankings on Google if it has good inbound links in addition to good content. However, it is important that you get the right links.

If the links to your web site have an unnatural pattern then Google probably won’t count these links. If you get many links with exactly the same link text in a short time period then these links might be interpreted as a Google bombing attempt.

Links to your web site are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google. You must get good inbound links to succeed with Google. It’s important that you get the right links to your web site. Details can be found in our free eBook “How to get high quality inbound links“.

Article - Courtesy: Axandra.com | Click here for Search Engine News & Facts | Click here to read Search Engine Optimization Articles |