IE7 and standards? They don’t think so.

Pick up your battle-axes again, oh pro-standards hordes: IE7 will not be CSS compliant according to Microsofts Internet Explorer team, who posted about supporting standards on their upcoming browser version (for which there’s a beta out already, too). And then they wonder why developers use the competition browsers?

When back at the 6th of July I wrote about Microsoft and WaSP‘s agreement of supporting standards in some of Microsofts products, I asked the question of whether this move included the Internet Explorer team and how this would actually benefit the end-user and developer communities. At the time, Molly Holzschlag replied stating that even though IE team members were involved, efforts weren’t going towards standards compliance:

We do have IE developers on board. The problem is that’s not an area where anyone can have influence right now, the internal issues are such that it’s just not possible.

That was the first hint that things weren’t looking as bright as they might seem for standards support. Chris Wilson on his post on the 29th threw the last stone into the discussion. They’re “sad” about not fully supporting standards, but they’re focussing on “security issues” like phishing or low-rights IE. Now Chris, how is it competition is able to accomodate all those and still be standards compliant? Shouldn’t there be a conscious effort to step up and just do it so you can finally ease the troops?

Not all is lost, though. They do seem to be fixing some bugs (refer to their blog post for a list), but that just sounds like using tapeglue on a flat tire to get some extra miles. Heck, it has tabbed browsing (with menu bars under the tabs – who the hell was the genious behind *that* one?) and fancy transparencies. It has to be worth something.

I believe we are doing a much better service to web developers out there in IE7 by fixing our known bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs and usability problems first, and prioritizing the most commonly-requested features based on all the feedback we’ve had.

As long as I don’t have to keep adding IE rendering fix code to perfectly standards compliant pages, I’ll do fine. My only problem is as a standards-based developer I want to support everyone in the audience. Even those who use IE. I guess we’ll just wait some more, and in the meantime, there’s still Firefox and everybody else.