This is truly great news, for several reasons. One is that Microsoft is now arguing for greater openness. That can only help the marketplace. The other is that, for the first time in a long time, they’re making a very good decision with respect to IE, and they’re making it for the right reasons. They’re making it because they want to play nicer with their clients and their developers. That’s what I call a win-win: they win, and we win. Everybody wins!

It sounds like a great idea, right? I mean, why should I have to worry that Microsoft released IE7? If I used this tag, and specified IE6, then my page would always render correctly in IE, even if IE was on version 28.

WRONG!!!

Let’s really look at this situation. There are two wrongs here, and Microsoft wants to add a third. Let’s look at how we got here.

1. Microsoft made a bad browser: it didn’t (and still doesn’t) support the CSS standard
2. Developers everywhere screwed up by coding pages that take advantage of the IE bugs, in a way that breaks in standards-compliant browsers (never mind that conditional comments makes this unnecessary)
3. Microsoft upgrades IE to version 7, and those bad sites break
4. Microsoft says, “If every web developer were to just change how they work, we could have upgrades that are ok.”

Do you see the fatal flaw in the logic?

It’s right there in steps 1 and 2.

If Microsoft made browsers that support the standards, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I say, no to Microsoft’s proposal. I say, if Microsoft doesn’t want to make browsers that support the standards, then their customers get what they deserve if the web starts breaking for them. I say, how about Microsoft step up to the plate and make a rendering engine that works instead of relying on everyone else to fix their problems for them.

“But what about all of those pages that the IE7 upgrade broke?” you ask. Those are bad pages, and IE7 is a bad browser. They’re either not coded to standards, or IE7 choked on the correct standards-compliant code they were using, or both. That’s why they broke. The people who paid for that development should switch developers to get someone who knows what they’re doing, who will code pages that actually work. The browser shouldn’t have been released if it didn’t support the standards.

This is why they’re called “Web Standards.” Because they’re standard. I make a page that works in Firefox, I know that it works in Safari. I should know that it works in IE. If that’s not true, then it’s IE’s problem, not mine.

Note to Microsoft

FIX YOUR D*** BROWSER ALREADY. It’s almost been a decade since IE5 started support for CSS 2, and they still haven’t gotten it right. They make $50 billion dollars a year and can’t make their browser behave.

Note to web developers

FIX YOUR D*** PAGES ALREADY. It’s almost been a decade since CSS2 came out. You haven’t figured out how it works yet? You call yourself a professional? Get with it.

I’m a bleeding-heart liberal

Zeldman posted about people just like me. He says, “We won’t get converts by breaking sites and ridiculing their creators for not knowing as much as we do.” He’s right.

Except that we’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because many of the web pages out there aren’t made by professionals. Anybody heard of Dreamweaver WYSIWYG mode? If the pages work, people are happy. Except that they don’t work. If they work in IE6, but not in IE7, they never worked. They just had the illusion of working.

Let’s make an analogy, to print design. If I, a rank amateur in the print design world, decided to print a book in 5 point Comic Sans and it was totally illegible, that’s my problem. It’s not the printer’s problem, or the reader’s problem. It’s mine. I screwed up, I made content that wasn’t accessible to anybody. Some readers have figured out that if they use a magnifying glass, it’s not so bad, they can read it. That doesn’t mean that my book wasn’t broken. Now let’s say that these people buy another book of mine, this time printed in 72 point Bembo. With their magnifying glass, they now complain that the new book is broken! They can’t read it. Nobody else can either, because the type is just too big. If I said, “Well, every publisher needs to do something so that my books are legible” you would say I’m stupid. It’s up to me to books that are legible. And that’s right. That’s why it’s up to Microsoft to stop making a browser that’s broken and expecting people to work around them. And it’s also up to developers to stop coddling the browser that’s broken.

Why the doctype switch isn’t targeting

One problem in this debate is that people are confusing doctype switching with version targeting. Using a standard doctype is like a contract: I, the developer, support this standard of HTML and CSS, so that you, the browser, can render it properly according to the same standard. The standard provides a common language, a shared vocabulary, so that the garbage I put in to the system is the same garbage that comes out. Targeting a browser isn’t the same thing. When I use conditional comments or other CSS hacks, I’m saying “hey browser, you’re don’t understand this sentence in our standard vocabulary, so I’m going to give you a sentence that you understand.” That’s not the same thing as saying which vocab you’re using. It’s like talking to a child — if you use a word the child doesn’t understand, you talk around it, explain it, you don’t switch languages. If I use the new meta-tag, and I target IE7, IE8, or IE42, it should render my page the same, according to the contract I say I’m holding to in my doctype declaration. End of story. If they don’t then they’ve got bugs.

Really?

Are we really going this way? I can’t believe that this industry is even considering Microsoft’s proposal. If the browsers aren’t upholding their end of the contract, why should we work around them? Let them be broken, let people decide they don’t want a broken browser, let the bad browsers die.

This is great news!

Wait a minute. Let’s try that again.

This should be great news!

The IE7 blog posted today about all of the CSS rendering bugs that they’ve fixed. The list is extensive, including almost all of the problems from positioniseverything.net. Notice that I say almost. The float clearing bug is still a bug in IE7. It seems so strange to me — they can squash all of the bugs but one? That’s like running the 100 yard dash and stopping at yard 98. Why can’t they seem to do what every other major browser developer has done? Is Microsoft so incompetent that they can’t even toe the line anymore? So much for being the largest, richest, most powerful corporation in the computer industry.

The impending mass adoption (because of the automatic update) of IE7, with is myriad bug fixes should make every web designer jump for joy, but alas it’s a mixed bag, because IE7 falls a little short of expectations. On the fateful day that IE7 rolls out, our sites will have to be instanteously compatible. Thankfully, for the most part they will. But be warned if you’ve ever used float clearing to make a layout work…
At least there will still be ways to target IE7, despite the fixing of the Holly hack, * html hack, etc. by the IE7 dev team. Not only have new hacks been discovered, which I won’t comment on, but it’s easy enough to put all IE7-directed CSS into a single file, and use conditional comments to target that file to IE7 alone.

My point, however, is that we shouldn’t have to. IE7 should just render the standard which Microsoft, as a member of the W3C, helped create. Just like everybody else.

Before I convince people that I’m just a cynical reflexive MS critic, I have to say that they’ve done quite a bit more than I thought they would. I mean, they made it to yard 98. I honestly didn’t think that the initial release of IE7 would get that far in the race for standards compliance. Kudos to the IE7 dev team for that.

For an interesting discussion about what people think, look at the conversation on Dave Shea’s post in the comments.

Let’s recap what’s happened, though.

1. MSFT announces that known hacks won’t work, and that developers should rely on conditional comments to target IE. At this point, I thought, “Oh no, here we go. They’re going to prevent us from targeting IE7, and IE7 won’t actually render things properly, so we’ll be left out to hang.”
2. MSFT makes progress, best illustrated by Molly Holzschlag’s recap of IE7’s rendering progress (including the rendering of Malarkey’s site). I’ll admit, with the latest release of IE7 beta 2, I thought there was light at the end of the tunnel. Removing the ability to specifically target IE7 isn’t a problem as long as it renders according to the standards.
3. Roger Johansson points out that the latest IE7 beta, the so-called “layout complete” version, doesn’t clear floats properly! Check the comments if you want to see some vitriol.
4. Nick Rigby points out that the “layout complete” IE7 only fixes 6 of the 7 bugs in his IE7 test suite.

So, essentially, IE7 is still going to be a broken browser, but without hacks we’ll have no way to target it. Wasn’t the whole point to have an IE browser that didn’t need special support? Thanks, Microsoft, you’re doing a bang-up job spending lots of money to make lots of headaches.