Orrin Bloquy's Journal: IE7 standards compliance: fact versus hype

The MSDN blogs insist that they rewrote IE from the ground up. Uh, no.

Yes, they corrected box model related glitches which were almost entirely the result of miscalculating which thing takes precedence, and there were a slew of them. Congrats on fixing those -- after nearly half a decade of reports and complaints. And yes, it looks like the > operator works now and :hover now works with all valid elements.

Unfortunately, the renderer they claim to have rewritten from scratch has a peculiar feature: every single CSS2 property which wasn't implemented in IE6 is still missing in IE 7 beta 2. Every HTML tag which renders incorrectly in IE 6 renders incorrectly in IE 7 beta 2. Every one. Many of those properties have no effect on the compatibility of existing websites, created in FrontPage or elsewhere.

By total coincidence, IE 7 beta 2 (which was specifically mentioned in their blogs as being the new renderer) has no support for any CSS spec beyond the ones in IE 6, even ones which have been requested repeatedly and implemented for years in all other browsers:

• CSS content insertion (before:, after:, content:)
• CSS Quote character selection
• Quote characters placed around contents of QUOTE elements
• Correct implementation of BUTTON (IE refuses to pass the VALUE attribute)
• OBJECT as a valid substitute for IMG (IE places nonremovable scrollbars around image; when given different height/width values, instead of scaling the image it resizes the pseudo-IFRAME around it)

These are only a few. Again, almost none of the missing spec has a negative effect on legacy webpages, and I'm not even mentioning the more abstruse CSS2 specs no other browser cares to implement (e.g. character width).

I'm inclined to believe they rewrote how IE works within the OS and its security model. However, the likelihood that they would intentionally release a developer beta that shows a renderer nearly identical to IE6's only leaves two possible conclusions:

1. The schedule was rushed and build 5296 aka beta 2 isn't an accurate representation of the new renderer, merely a demonstration of a more accurate object model.
2. Redmond thinks a waxed paperboard box filled with steaming feces is entitled to be called vanilla ice cream.