Mike Lane
Oct-17-2005, 02:17 PM
So if you don't know, IE7 is on its way. I'm not sure when. I'm hoping before Vista is released in the last half of 2006 but I'm not 100% sure. Anyhow, the IE7 developer's blog is imploring everyone to fix up their css hacks so things won't break when IE7 is rolled out. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/10/12/480242.aspx
From the sounds of it, this may only affect pages with the strict doctype either xhtml 1.0 or html 4.01; however, ultimately xhtml 1.1 will come out and there won't be a distinction between strict and transitional. Many hacks that are dedicated to isolating IE are likely to fail to access IE7 which means that certain web pages may have problems. The suggestion is that everyone starts using conditional comments to target browsers (which is kind of a pain).
All well and good and scary sounding. But here's my thinking. If IE7 is supposed to have full standards compliance of CSS 2 (and 2.1 when it is finalized) just as other browsers like firefox and safari currently do, then it should react to the hacks just like firefox and safari currently do. So certain things will be implemented differently as was described on the link. I'm sure there will be certain hacks that you will be able to use to target IE7 specifically to fix those strange items. It's unfortunate that they are expecting everyone to do this in the blind what with IE7 not being a public beta and all. I for one won't be changing my code any time soon, but I will be getting IE7 as soon as it is publically available so I can let all you dgrinners know if your pages are going to be all messed up.
From the sounds of it, this may only affect pages with the strict doctype either xhtml 1.0 or html 4.01; however, ultimately xhtml 1.1 will come out and there won't be a distinction between strict and transitional. Many hacks that are dedicated to isolating IE are likely to fail to access IE7 which means that certain web pages may have problems. The suggestion is that everyone starts using conditional comments to target browsers (which is kind of a pain).
All well and good and scary sounding. But here's my thinking. If IE7 is supposed to have full standards compliance of CSS 2 (and 2.1 when it is finalized) just as other browsers like firefox and safari currently do, then it should react to the hacks just like firefox and safari currently do. So certain things will be implemented differently as was described on the link. I'm sure there will be certain hacks that you will be able to use to target IE7 specifically to fix those strange items. It's unfortunate that they are expecting everyone to do this in the blind what with IE7 not being a public beta and all. I for one won't be changing my code any time soon, but I will be getting IE7 as soon as it is publically available so I can let all you dgrinners know if your pages are going to be all messed up.