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Sitepoint.com recently published a somewhat anti-climatic article espousing the CSS shortcomings of IE7, more than a year after the product was launched, and about two years after IE7′s beta was released for testing.

I can’t help but feel that some of this frustration aimed at Microsoft is unfair. The developers of IE7 have always stated that CSS2 support was their goal but also that IE7 would never pass the Acid test.

IE7 fixed the bugs we bitched about the most: Peekaboo, double-floating margin, box model, PNG support, etc. Apparently they even visited positioniseverything.net to get the real deal scoop on what geeks were complaining about. (Perhaps if we’d been more united in our call for standards-compliance, they might have listened, but that’s another story.)

As one commenter to the Sitepoint article put it, “…no web developer that I know of is going to shout the praises of IE.” I’ve toiled under IE6′s hot sun as long as anyone else, but from my perspective, in the last year, Microsoft seems to have made a pretty fundamental shift in their view towards standards-compliance. In IE6′s hey-day, the notion of “web standards” was probably something they’d written off as Mozilla propaganda.

And then overnight somehow (or probably when they woke up and realized Firefox suddenly had close to 10% of the market share), the intolerable were preaching tolerance:

We heard the feedback from the developer community that has asked us for a long time to move to a more standard-compliant rendering behavior. We are balancing this request with the needs of our customers to not have their pages broken. To find a balance we introduced a strict mode in IE6 that lets authors opt in to the more standards-compliant rendering. Pages authored under non-strict mode (quirks) will not change behavior in IE7 and will not be affected by broken CSS filters. Under strict mode, we have made and will continue to make changes to be more standard-compliant. As a side product, content from an older strict version might break when we have to do behavior changes to be more complaint. This has happened to the broken CSS filters. They relied on specific implementation behavior rather than the CSS specifications. – Microsoft Development Network, January 31, 2006

It’s hard enough to get the very agencies that we front-end developers work for to seriously take up the web standards mantle; further, most of these agencies aren’t nearly the size of billion dollar-behemoth, Microsoft (although some of us are owned by them, heh.)

And no, emphatically, no, I’m not writing this to support my parent company (but if you are listening, look down upon me with favor, mighty one!).

As a front-end developer, time is a precious commodity, and when it comes down to it, ensuring that pages rendered in IE7 appear consistent with other standards-compliant browsers is minimal, at best, provided you follow a few simple steps:

1. Use a valid DOCTYPE with the strict setting, either HTML or XHTML
2. Ensure your HTML markup and CSS is standards-compliant. The majority of “bugs” that have been discovered with IE7 relate to when users incorrectly input values, declarations and properties. While Firefox is more forgiving of these types of mistakes, IE7 is not. Tough!
3. Stick to CSS2 for the most part.