Archive for August, 2006

A note more for myself than anything, but here is a list of bug fixes in IE7:

established since IE6.  

Here is the list of CSS features and changes for IE7:

Bugs we fixed

• All bugs on positioniseverything.net except the “escaping floats” bug (which is planned for the future)
  • 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

Details on some of the other bugs (from sources other than the positioniseverything.net list) that we fixed:

• Overflow now works correctly! (That means boxes do not automatically grow any more.)
• Parser bugs: * html, _property and /**/ comment bug 
• Select control: CSS style-able and not always on top
• Auto-sizing of absolute positioned element with width:auto and right & left (great for 3 column layouts)
• Addressed many relative positioning issues
• Addressed many absolute positioned issues
• % calculations for height/width for abs positioned elements http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=191182
• <?xml> prolog no longer causes quirks mode
• HTML element truly independent of the Body (now gets its own width, height etc.)
• 1 px dotted borders no longer render as dashed
• Bottom margin bug on hover does not collapse margins
• Several negative margin issues fixed
• Recalc issues including relative positioning and/or negative margins are fixed now
• CLSID attribute of <object> tag no longer limited to 128 characters
• :first-letter whitespace bug described in http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/02/460115.aspx fixed
• Descendant selector now works properly for grand children when combined with other selectors
• First-line and first-letter now applies when there is no space between word :first-line and opening brace {
• Pseudo-classes now are working as expected if selector is excluded
• The :link selector works now for anchor tag with href set to bookmark
• Addressed !important issues
• PositionIsEverything piefecta-rigid.htm now works
• List-item whitespace bug fixed
• Fixed Absolutely Buggy II
• Absolute positioned elements now use always correct containing block for positioning and size information
• Nested block elements now respect all overflow declarations (hidden, scroll, etc)
• Fixed the opposing offset problem (absolute positioned element whit all four top, bottom left and right are present)
• <a> tags nested within LI elements will no longer add extra bottom margin when hover occurs
• We no longer lose the image aspect ratio on refresh
• Cleaned up our ident parsing according to CSS2.1 rules
• Fixed parsing bugs for multi- class selectors and class selectors that are combined with id selectors
• And many more

We also extended our existing implementations to comply with W3C specifications:

• Enable :hover on all elements not just on <a>
• Background-attachment: fixed works on all elements – so Eric Meyer’s complexspiral demo works
• Improved <object> fallback

Finally, we added new features from CSS2.1:

• Min/max width/height support (also for images, which did not work in IE7b2)
• Transparent borders
• Fixed positioning support
• Selectors: first-child, adjacent, attribute, child
  • A couple of CSS 3 attribute selectors: prefix, suffix and substring since we were working already in the code base (also the general sibling selector)
• Alpha channel PNG support (Not a CSS feature but too important for designers to not call it out J)

Better Standards Support…But as we’ve been continually reminded, better standards support in IE also means some pages break.  As we struggle to balance the needs of our user customers with the desires of web developers, we need your help.  The only way for us to continue to improve our standards support is to get your help in changing your sites for IE7. We have provided a set of documentation and tools to help you transition your pages to IE7:

• The IE 7 Readiness Toolkit pulls together documentation, tools, and guidance for developers, testers, and ITPros to prepare sites, extensions and applications for IE 7.
• The Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 – documentation on common breaking patterns and techniques you can do to avoid them.
• Developer and ITPro Checklists
• The IE Developer Center is the clearinghouse for all (past and present) IE developer information.
• We have an Application Compatibility Toolkit that logs and identifies changes in behavior due to changes in IE 7 and Vista.
• All of this is wrapped up for you in the Information Index for IE 7.

Obviously not perfect, but a good step forward. The positioning stuff, rendering issues, border issues and margin issues will solve a whack of the problems developers run into on a normal basis. Of course, chopping off the bigger issues means there’re even more smaller issues that people will become aware of. While this means they won’t hit full compliance, the biggest change for me?

They’ve decided it’s okay to break older pages to actually implement standards. This is, obviously, needed. Otherwise things stagnate (ahem, like they hadn’t enough already). This really means that future standards fixes will be easier and faster. If the team is actually still planning to do yearly releases (as they hinted at), we could well see full standards support by mid next year. Well, full CSS support anyways.