Customer Street CSS

Here at Customer Street we like to do things right. In CSS terms this means building nice that work across all browsers and generally look the way the customer, or the company planned. However, if you are not a web developer you may not know that getting things to look right for Internet Explorer is a nightmare. This is because the browser does not recognise a lot of the proprietary styles that are in the Web Standard Definitions, and so we are forced to either changed our styles or find other hacks and tricks to get around the rendering issues.

I’ve just been sent a very interesting link about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, that was set to change the way developers code their websites completely, again!

Originally, Internet Explorer 8 was set to burden web developers, like all of the other Internet Explorer releases, this time by requiring the use of an extra meta tag for each page of content, that told Internet Explorer 8 which standards mode to render in… either Internet Explorer 8’s standard mode, or that compatible for Internet Explorer 7. Of course, if Microsoft had gotten things right from the start then there wouldn’t be any problems whatsoever.

The good part was that they had attempted to make it Standards Compliant and it even rendered the Acid2 Test Page correctly… for about a day!

However, as most web developers know, there are so many tricks and hacks needed to create a web site that looks as it should in, especially, Internet Explorer 6. And, although Internet Explorer 7 was a huge improvement, it still didn’t have the completely rendering capabilities of the other major browsers out there.

It was because of this flaw from the start that web developers had to ‘hack’ their CSS using all sorts of weird and wonderful methods, or by creating ‘Conditional Comments’ (the only Microsoft Godsend to help fix their own mistakes) to allow for browser specific styles. So, when you look at a page in Internet Explorer 8, the thought was that you might actually need it to render as Internet Explorer 7 because of the hacks you’d put in place to get things to works for versions 7 and 6. Confused? Good.

However, it is now apparent by the latest posting on the IEBlog that Microsoft have realised (by the amount of feedback recieved because of the original post) that this method is actually not really appropriate and that Internet Explorer 8 should render in complete Standards Compliance Mode and even offers some support for CSS3.

You can read the article here. Feel free to leave a comment as to what you make of this. The conclusion here being that Microsoft, once again attempted to come up with an ingenious way of covering their own mistakes, yet realised (finally) that it’d be a lot more straight forward to just start again! Thank God for that!

3

after 1 Votes