My Annoyance over IE7
Aug 28, 2006When Internet Explorer 7 was announced by Microsoft it seemed that Redmond has gotten the wake up call loud and clear and realized that the Mozilla camp was for real and not just a bunch of idealistic open source hippies. It also instilled hope in web designers that they could actually start writing hack-free XHTML without fear of IE rendering it like some captive monkey hopped up on meth.
As far as I can tell though, Microsoft is still giving the rendering monkey its meth fix through the backdoor, rather than forcing the poor guy to go cold turkey. Enter Quirks mode and Strict Mode.
From an article by Paul Thurott:
“Regarding Web site compatibility, Tony Chor, a Group Program Manager for IE, told me during a recent briefing that IE 7 offers two rendering modes. The first, called Quirks Mode (or Compatibility Mode), renders Web pages almost exactly like IE 5 and IE 6; this is the mode that IE 7 operates in by default due to the millions of internal and public Web sites around the world that rely on particular IE behavior. The second mode, called Standards Mode (or Strict Mode) is what Chor calls “our best standards-based implementation.” To access this mode, Web sites need to add a special !DOCTYPE tag to the top of their HTML files. Curiously, this tag was available in IE 6 as well, though I had never heard of it.”
From what I’ve read on the internet after researching this a bit basically there is some confusion over what triggers Quirks mode and what doesn’t. And even if you do get IE7 in Strict mode many of the irritating CSS bugs still remain. So basically as far as I can tell it’s basically a crap shoot as to whether or not IE7 will render your page correctly or not … which is pretty much the same as it was in IE6.
I’m glad Microsoft is acknowledging that IE6 was broken when it came to web standards, but instead of trying to please both the sites full of IE6 hacks and hack-free sites I wish they just would have bit the bullet and told people IE7 is going standards compliant. Now back to waiting for Internet Explorer 8.