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.