Microsoft”s blog admission that IE7 will not support standards at the heart of the flexible, accessible web is shameful, according to web testers SciVisum.
“Microsoft”s admission that IE7 will not support leading and well established standards such as CSS is shameful and undermines accessibility efforts. While accessibility may well not be a mission critical element like security, this is a moral issue – saying it”s not a priority sets a callous example, and thousands of businesses will follow suit. Microsoft needs to lead by example and be at the cutting edge.
Or perhaps Firefox has them on the run and they”re just not taking IE7 seriously anymore? At 50 million users and counting, Firefox”s rapid success is a threat. Perhaps Microsoft is putting all its efforts into clever features and go-faster stripes in order to out-market Firefox – at the cost of good engineering and web standards.
Wake up and smell the coffee Microsoft! The CSS standards penny has dropped, and unless IE7 starts to fall in line, how long will it be before the developers forums become a strangely familiar echo of where they were three years ago – only this time round they won”t be saying that designing for IE is enough and you can ignore the other browser – they”ll be saying that designing for standards-based browsers is enough and you can ignore the IE users!
Developers have already commented that IE is taking on the role that Netscape version 4 used to have – it”s a drag on web development that is too widely deployed to ignore.
Standards in IT are a strange thing. In reality, nothing fits 100% to standards – there are always areas that a standard omits to cover, or technology has moved ahead, and that leaves room for ambiguity.
But the Internet has got where it has today through standards. Because 20 years ago the Internet community published the open standard ”simple message transport protocol” SMTP for email, we now have access from desktop, blackberry, Mac, Linux, university mainframe, phone, or PDA. And standards like CSS and the more recent HTML ones are part of the process of making the Web more functional and effective and accessible.
Web designers the world over are now realising the value of making their sites HTML complaint, using CSS effectively and following the Web Accessibility Guidelines – because it simplifies the job of making a site work for a wider audience. More designers are realising the benefit of designing with a standards-based browser like Firefox as their prime quick-view browser to check their work as they go.
At the end of the day though I am optimistic – it feels like the tide has turned and standards-based browsers are starting to rule the roost. Perhaps Microsoft will be the last to read the signs as Internet Explorer becomes like the early browser Mosaic…forgotten and left behind.”
About Microsoft IE7 support for accessibility standards Microsoft has admitted IE7 will not pass the Web Standards Project”s Acid2 test, which examines a browser”s support for W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations including CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets), HTML4 and PNG (Portable Network Graphics).
Chris Wilson, lead programme manager for the web platform in IE, commented in a Microsoft blog http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx, “I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation… In that vein, I”ve seen a lot of comments asking if we will pass the Acid2 browser test published by the Web Standards Project when IE7 ships. I”ll go ahead and relieve the suspense by saying we will not pass this test when IE7 ships.”
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