There’s something particularly endearing about standing in the lepers line at a particular session at JavaOne this year. The lepers line, in case you weren’t aware, is for the poor sods who showed up to a session thinking they had registered, when they in fact hadn’t. You stick you card on the cute little reader, and it flashes an angry accusatory red, insisting you have not registered. The nearest usher will then calmly but surely place you in the lepers line, where you get to shuffle about uncomfortabely and look like the dumb bastard who couldn’t figure out how to register, or was too lazy to do so.

Having been one of those rejects twice, I’d argue that the members of the line form a kind of silent (and often not so silent) bond. Sure, we don’t know how to navigate one of the most poorly written webapps for selecting and scheduling sessions, but by god, we’ll give it our best shot.

Pitifully, I managed to attend just one session yesterday (not including my own), so there’s not much to report on that front. However, this JavaOne is, perplexingly….vibrant? There’s a certain energy that seems to have been lacking recently. I’ve noticed more than one person comment on the quality of the talks and topics, and how much fewer of them seem to be pointless fluffy Sun penis wagglage marketing poop.

The linux distribution license thing announced yesterday is worthy of note; it’s always thrilling to see another nail hammered into Apache Harmony’s coffin. Why all the members of that project don’t just crawl into Stallman’s beard and die is a mystery as yet unsolved.

It’ll be at least interesting to see how the content evolves, given that some of the editors (well, one of) can barely string together a coherent sentence, and has the mental acumen of a small pebble

Related Articles

• Zune vs. IPod (0)
• Vyatta Community Edition 5.0.2: New Features (0)
• Ultra X Linux: Ubuntu With A Faster Kernel (0)
• Ultimate Tips For Ubuntu Users: Get Ubuntu Pocket Guide For Free (0)
• Ubuntu Linux and Windows Can Share The Desktop In Absence Of Virtual Machines (2)
• Ubuntu Hidden Senses Revealed By gNewSense (0)

While the question about IE 7 being compliant with CSS 3.0 is premature, we are still anxiously waiting to see how IE 7 measures up with CSS 2.1 compliancy.  Ultimately, while I can hope that it will support some of the standards in CSS 3.0, I still shake my head in amazement that it has taken Microsoft this long to become compliant with the current standards. So I am not going to hold my breath, especially since CSS 3.0 has yet to be released.

Hopefully, since IE 7 has been completely rewritten from the ground up, we can only assume at this point that it can only do a better job this time around, and for CSS 3.0 once it has been released.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

There are still many reports around the Web about Internet Explorer bugs, and while I wouldn’t expect that they would fix each and every one of them (why not?), it looks like the vast majority of them are going to be corrected.  Included in the list from MSDN were these for which I couldn’t find a description, and haven’t experienced personally: moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders, the 1px border style, and losing the ability to highlight text under the top border.

I would like to point out something in particular about the asterisk selector used to give explicit rules to IE.  The root node selector has long been used to create rules that only work in IE, such as with the use of universal selectors, like the asterisk. In IE 7, since many of the rules that didn’t render correctly had to be addressed, these rules are now evident, unlike in previous versions of IE.  The problem is now created for style sheets that utilize the child selectors or the universal selectors that contain these IE-specific rules, because they will have duplicated or merged rules that were never intended to be used this way.  As you can imagine, this will create a genuine disaster for those coders.

Initially, reports were made by Microsoft that child selectors, pseudo-classes and universal selectors were not going to be supported still in IE 7, but those reports are changing.  We still don’t ultimately know what will be in the final version, as it is still in beta testing, but what we can see is that a massive amount of bugs with regard to CSS are going to be fixed.  While this is good news to most, those that have implemented workarounds may not be so thrilled.

Microsoft has also rethought the way IE handles pseudo-classes.  IE uses a very strict interpretation of pseudo elements in the parser, and this would cause certain constructs to be disregarded. Any pseudo-element had to be the very last thing in the selector in versions prior to IE 7.

The CSS2 specification was interpreted by IE in such a way that there can be only one pseudo-element per selector, and it must appear in the last simple-selector within the selector. Because of IE’s strict interpretation, in the event of any non-whitespace character or token after a pseudo-element, it wouldn’t render correctly, if at all, and an error flag would be thrown into the rule. In IE 7, the error flag is more carefully applied, even though multiple pseudo-elements and pseudo elements in simple selectors beginning a complex selector will still fail.  According to Microsoft, this is still the correct interpretation of the standards regarding pseudo-classes.

There are other issues that IE 7 will support, like fixed positioning and child, adjacent, attribute, and first-child selector tags, fixes for any :hover elements, and background-attachment: fixed on all elements, not just body element.

Related Articles

• Yahoo! Mobile Service Will Be Launched (0)
• Windows Live Essentials Beta Is Updated (0)
• Web Browsing In A Cinematic Fashion: Cooliris (0)
• Ultimate Windows Tweaker Puts Vista On Steroids (0)
• Transparent custom borders and corners development (0)
• Top 101 Most Downloaded Windows Software: Free Demo Movies and Download Links (0)

• Peekaboo bug - This bug occurs when a liquid box has a float inside, and content appears alongside that float.  In Internet Explorer, the box with all its content sometimes just disappears, which then reappears upon scrolling or switching windows.
• Guillotine bug – This is a bug that chops off the bottom part of floated elements when certain links are hovered over, or causes content in a floated element to be chopped off at the bottom.
• Duplicate Character bug - This bug involves multiple floated elements; text characters from the last of the floated elements are sometimes duplicated below the last float.
• Border Chaos – This bug draws parts of the surrounding borders all over the place, even eliminating bits here and there when negative margins for consecutive flowed boxes are used.
• No Scroll bug – IE may not force a scrollbar even if the content is long enough to require one, resulting in hidden content.
• 3 Pixel Text Jog – IE applies a 3px space on text next to a floated element, but corrects itself once a floated element is ended.
• Magic Creeping Text bug – This bug is triggered by nesting one block element inside another, and giving the following styles to the outer element.  When triggered, the bug pushes the text in the inner element, but not the element itself, to the left an amount equal to twice the width of the left border.
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover – In IE, if you use a few anchor tags for a menu that have some vertical distance from each other by using the bottom margin, and on hover want them to change background color, the bug removes the margin of the anchor two places behind it.
• IE/Win Line-height bug – Line-height is incorrectly rendered if the line contains a replaced element.
• Double Float Margin Bug - One of the most common complaints CSS developers have with Internet Explorer is the doubling of margins of a floated element.
• Quirky Percentages in IE – IE chooses to calculate the percentage of a child item based on rendered page flow instead of taking the parent attribute and using that to calculate the percentage.  Because it can’t calculate the percent from an unknown, it “guesses.”
• Duplicate indent – The bug causes in-line elements (images, text) adjacent to a floated div to appear to be indented from their expected location.
• Disappearing List-background – This bug is caused by placing a list with a background set within a floated div that has been relatively positioned, causing the background to display incorrectly.
• Fix width:auto – This bug resulted from prior versions of IE’s lack of support for fixed width positioning.

Related Articles

• Yahoo! Mobile Service Will Be Launched (0)
• Windows Live Essentials Beta Is Updated (0)
• Web Browsing In A Cinematic Fashion: Cooliris (0)
• Ultimate Windows Tweaker Puts Vista On Steroids (0)
• Transparent custom borders and corners development (0)
• Top 101 Most Downloaded Windows Software: Free Demo Movies and Download Links (0)

There has been a lot of hype surrounding the release of Internet Explorer 7. Improvements range from better security issues to customization of user features; but the excitement in some web developers has been prompted by the compliancy standards of CSS that IE 7 embraces.I can also say that an equal number are trying not to vomit at the idea of having to go back and seek out every style sheet they wrote that may break in the light of the new compliancy. Thinking about it makes my head hurt a little, and if you’ve ever written sloppy code (which we all have) or had to delicately balance a design with a few non-compliant hacks, I’m sure you’ll be reaching for the Advil, too.

Internet Explorer, while being one of the first browsers to incorporate support for CSS, has been the last to really get on board in regard to compliancy. CSS developers know that of all the browsers that they need to usually come up with workarounds while coding, Internet Explorer is the most buggy, as well as the most frustrating, and needs the most attention when it comes to CSS. And it is because of these bugs that workarounds have been implemented that may now cause these brilliant CSS hackers to cringe with the fixes incorporated in IE 7.

In the latest version of IE, Microsoft has fixed many of the bugs in IE that create problems for CSS. In this article, I want to look at some of the bugs that IE has contained relating to CSS, what they are, and how version 7 addresses these issues. You can only currently download a copy of IE 7 beta for development purposes if you have an MSDN developer license, but (at the time of this writing) supporters indicate that the release of IE 7 to the public may happen as early as by the end of January, 2006. I was able to get my hands on a copy for development purposes, and I have to say that thus far, I am fairly impressed.

I’m a big supporter of CSS compliant code, and luckily, I’ve never relied upon CSS hacks. Perhaps it is because I have a slight bit of OCD (Obsessive Coding Disorder) where I like my code neat and clean, nicely grouped into like sections and commented accordingly, and don’t ever want to have to think about it again once it’s completed, unless I decided I wanted to change a font color or something. I for one am happy that I won’t have to keep checking my designs in multiple browsers, although I know that currently everyone else in the world that uses IE (besides the beta testers, that is) won’t have a copy of IE 7 just yet.

The following list regarding the bug fixes where CSS is concerned you may have already seen once or twice, but I’ve taken the time to research them a bit and explain to you what they are and what they do to your once happy code. Therefore, my list will be quite different from those you’ve seen, and I’ve compiled the descriptions all into one place for your convenience. The sheer reason for this is that once you read the descriptions, you remember that particular problem, whereas with the sometimes cute or ominous nicknames these bugs have been given, you may not have a clue what Microsoft may have been referring to.

Related Articles

• Yahoo! Mobile Service Will Be Launched (0)
• Windows Live Essentials Beta Is Updated (0)
• Web Browsing In A Cinematic Fashion: Cooliris (0)
• Ultimate Windows Tweaker Puts Vista On Steroids (0)
• Transparent custom borders and corners development (0)
• Top 101 Most Downloaded Windows Software: Free Demo Movies and Download Links (0)

It is harmful to use “* html” because you don’t know whether the issues - real bugs or simple differences in behavior - you are working around will be removed when “* html” goes away. If you DO know this for the particular issue you’re working around, then it is not harmful. If you do NOT know this, then you should use a versioning-capable system like conditional comments, and be prepared that you will have to update your workarounds when the issues are fixed.

That seems entirely sensible. I do think the original posting is highly unclear in this regard. And I do think the vast majority of sites using the * html hack, for instance, know why they are doing so.

I think the point is many web developers posting to this blog expressing confusion at this article, are actually expressing *trust* that the other bugs you’ve fixed, have indeed been fixed. If, as per your excellent previous postings, this there should be no need for sane web developers to start moving to conditional comments, as you yourself note.
I definitely like a previous posters idea of open sourcing ie. perhaps they could run dual versions. standardIE and openIE, a community run project. similar to the regular SUSE versus openSUSE. i think this would make ie a lot better. and it wouldnt take 4 years to come out with a new version. (it was only 1 year between firefox releases)

I also like mozilla’s nightly builds, a new testing build every day. many previous posts on this blog talk about bug fixes, but since there’s no build for us to test, theres only the very limited ie dev staff to test it. i enjoy using the firefox auto-update to download a small 500k update everyday that includes bug fixes and new features. it allows for quicker bug filing and fixing. (most major firefox bugs get fixed in a few hours/minutes).

Related Articles

• No related posts.

I doubt Opera, Netscape and Mozilla etc, would all agree to make a change just to support microsoft’s whacky ideas.

IE is also in new development stages, so Microsoft might as well change the ‘legend’ tag’s behaviour while they’re at it - As well as everything else.

I say release a version of IE that addresses the CSS hacks of today, and let the currently hacked implementations break. Sure, there will be a small hiccup while thousands of jobs are created to fix web sites, but the end game sounds sweeter and worth the troubles.

I see a couple of issues in this request of MS that require further study:

How many sites will break if the comments are not used? My guess is the sites affected is a minority. It might be the loudest group, but a minority still.

I see this all the time with software companies, not wanting to break a few eggs.Sure, some people will get upset if you release a version of the software that disrupts the current process, but we’re moving to where the grass is greener. This sounds like an education issue - not an implementation issue.

And finally, shouldn’t the new IE ignore the IE 6 hacks anyways? Isn’t that why they’re called IE 6 hacks?

Related Articles

• No related posts.

More important than the empty legend tag thing for me (and I agree with the others, here… displaying an empty tag makes no sense), I hope IE7’s fieldsets display correctly when a background color is present. If that’s intentional behavior, that also doesn’t make sense.

Lots of effort to conform pages to buggy w3c standards.

“Gil”, Microsoft doesn’t own the blog software, it’s community server by Telligent.

YWDRYP: Why don’t all the other browsers change to be like IE? After all, w.r.t. the legend tag, IE is just as compliant as the others are (since the spec doesn’t say what to do with an empty legend tag). And IE has more than 90% of the market share, so clearly the other browsers should be following IE’s lead here.

Since this isn’t a spec compliance issue (the spec is silent in this matter), they should follow the behavior of the dominant browser, and not be different for the sake of being different.

Microsoft should follow examples by other browser makers because they’re already more developed in standards than IE. It would also be easier for IE to change then for all the other browsers makers to make that one change.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

Concerning css-hacks for IE6 and IE5, IE7 should behave exactly like other browsers do.
This can’t be such a big problem.

You can’t ask us to change our sites, just because your new browser behaves in a strange way. You/Microsoft will get real hate, if you don’t make IE7 a „real“ browser.

You shouldn’t insist in going your own way by doing things different.
Do things right.

Why do you hide the form at the end of the page?
That’s annoying …

Let’s all petition the leaders of our countries to declare war on their allies. I mean, if we can’t have total world peace, what’s the point of doing it “half way”?

Come on. Lets get serious. If you went to the doctor with 2 broken legs and he told you he could only fix the right one, would you say “if you’re only going to do a half job, don’t bother”? Just because you choose to be stubborn doesn’t make Microsoft’s effort any less important.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

For everyone asking who is going to pay for the ‘additional work’ IE 7 is going to create, well, go talk to who pays your bills now — your customers! Are you honestly suggesting that you want all future versions of IE to be as badly broken as IE 6? As painful as it may be, the answer is to get everyone using a standards compliant browser as quickly as possible.

Is Microsoft responsible for this whole mess? Sure, it has a big share of the blame. But remember this whole thing started before ANYONE was compliant with ANY standards. Remember the browser war? It wasn’t as though everyone’s favorite (Netscape) was standards compliant either. It was a battle and all browsers were trying to figure out what customers really wanted; everyone was looking for an advantage.

If MS had a little more forsight it would probably have realized there isn’t any money in the browser anyway and since it dominates the OS market it would end up being the dominant browser regardless of the competition. It could have saved the world a lot of money, but Microsoft didn’t have the foresight to see that and instead, we have a mess. It may have been the only company that could have prevented the mess but it surely wasn’t the only one that caused it.

We also need to differentiate between the ‘bugs’ and the ‘differences’. Bugs need to be fixed. The “differences” need “alignment”. If the spec isn’t specific enough, we’re going to have problems. Everyone’s favorite suggestion here is to have Microsoft change their decision and make it comply with Firefox’s behavior. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen. But from the other perspective, IE is still far and away the dominant browser; maybe the other browsers should change the way they handle it? Or maybe someone should figure out which way is better and create a standard!

Some hacks are going to be problematic and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Software changes…we hope it improves and in this case, we hope it becomes standards compliant. The process of doing so will cause us all a lot of pain — this fact of life was ensured way back when MS didn’t commit to a standards compliant browser back from day one. When nobody else did either.

Go ahead, beat them up about not being any smarter than their competition on that issue. I’m going back to work.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

The only way I can see such hacks causing problems is if IE7 is only half fixed so that either it doesn’t see the hacks but still needs them do to shoddy style rules handling or so that it gets the rules right so that it doesn’t need the hacks, but still reads the hacks anyway due to improper selector rule handling. If both the style rules and the selector rules handling are fixed, there’s no problem, right?

I suppose it’s therapeutic to give everybody an outlet to complain about Microsoft as a corporation. Unfortunately there’s the whacko calling them “capitalistic” as if that’s a bad thing. I thought the problem was when companies *abuse* the system. Oh well.

I wish the signal-to-noise ratio was a bit higher, but between the noise there’s been plenty of good discussion about better ways to handle this problem in CSS.

I think a lot of us agree that display: none would be a more universal way to address the quirky treatment of legend. Since IE’s handling doesn’t technically violate the specification, we should fix it for ALL browsers who handle it IE’s way, not just for IE as a conditional comment would do.

With all due respect to the IE team (and I’m obviously addressing the developers here — not Bill Gates himself), I think we either need more testcases (like the legend element on Slashdot) or a copy of IE7 in our hands. Hacking CSS is a practical consideration, not some sort of science.

I often use the child selector to avoid ‘real’ rendering bugs in IE5/6. Rendering differences are a reality and are something designers and developers needs to advise their clients about.
I’ll be continuing to use the child selector to get around IE5-6 bugs that have been fixed in IE7. And so far it looks like that I’ve dodged a bullet by implementing it in the past for bugs that IE7 seems to have fixed.

So the advice should sound more like; “Only write workarounds for bugs and not for rendering differences.” And make sure your fix is CSS compliant. Remember, your pages will look differently from browser to browser to expect otherwise is folley.

How about you just make IE 7 ignore these hacks like other ’standards compliant’ browser? IE 7 sounds like a job creator… conditional CSS is a total PITA.

Play with the sample code that is posted above by adding some background colors to each element. I think you will agree that IE6 (and IE7?) handling of the legend tag is ugly. If you specify a legend in IE, the background color of the fieldset “escapes” the grouping frame and looks very ugly. In Firefox it stays inside the frame. IE’s interpretation may be within the spec but it does not yield nice looking web pages.

Related Articles

• Yahoo Messenger Archive Decoder Is Free (0)
• Top 101 Most Downloaded Windows Software: Free Demo Movies and Download Links (0)
• Today’s Expensive TV’s (0)
• The next generation High Definition movie players (0)
• Skyfire 1.0: Free Mobile Browser With Full Support For Web 2.0 Technologies (0)
• Sideline Allows Twitter Monitoring Directly From Your Desktop (0)

It looks quite like a designer’s hybris to assume that non-support of a major browser would change anything on market share. Web design is about serving customers, not about changing markets.

If your site, or the one of your employer/customer breaks, it’s you who’s getting blamed and asked to fix it. If you blame it on IE, then this doesn’t change a thing. Just fix it or get lost. Contrary to your belief web designers are not the center of the universe.

IE7 already works very well with most sites *because* it is more standard compliant, and due to security reasons and MS marketing it’s share will be relevant pretty soon after release.

Aside from the fact that it’s very funny to see MS people ask the community to please remove all the hacks they had to put in to get their pages to render on previous IE versions (really, I laughed out loud) I would like to point out that THE REASON we have all these hacks is the giant marketshare of IE 5 and 6.

Given Joe Public’s upgrade path (many are STILL using 5.5, or even 5.0 by the looks of my logs) I don’t expect IE7 to become mainstream for a long long time to come, and with Firefox reaching maturity and Opera becoming free as in beer it might never happen.

To expect people to fix their pages because you’re creating what is destined to become another niche browser (yes, I’m talking ’bout IE7)…well, you don’t get out much, do you?

If I were you I’d go the MS way and code in CSS-hack-hacks, because hell will freeze over before the community will work with you on this one.

As others have pointed out, it’s a little odd to make this request now when most web developers don’t even have the ability to test their code on IE7. Release the IE7 public beta and I’m sure many of us will jump on this request.

Related Articles

• No related posts.

CSS hacks are the most ingenious, cleanest and most of the time only way to cope with well-known CSS bugs in IE 5 and 6 like the box model bug, the three pixel jog, the double margin bug, the guillotine bug etc.

The Slashdot <legend> example is about something not specified in the HTML spec and someone decided to target this with a CSS hack. There might be better solutions but to conclude that CSS hacks are evil, is just a sign of utmost ignorance.

I’m sure, that IE7 would have not fixed all bugs. Conditional comments are helpfull, but I prefere to provide a special CSS file for all IEs and use CSS hacks inside to separate the versions. It’s not performant, to use multiple CSS files instead and other authors may use only one CSS file (at media screen). Therefore, and because Microsoft fixes only security bugs in a major version of IE, CSS hacks are quite necessary.

Of course the child-selector cannot be used as a CSS hack any more, but what about * html? I see no reason to fix this bug, because it’s only used as CSS hack. Leave this bug and we have the choice, to change our CSS for IE 7 using the child selector for bugs already fixed in IE 7 and the star-html hack for bugs still remained.

Otherwise we have to find out a new bug for a new CSS hack - but why? We should change our CSS now. You should see the advantage of using a well known CSS hack instead of creatng a new hack when IE7 will be published.

Well, I do appreciate that you work on the IE standard issues and I do also appreciate that you try to inform web designers that this will break some and which hacks.

I would strongly suggest to create a document describing the best practice for web designers to deal with these issues.

Related Articles

• No related posts.