Web Standards and Microsoft's Internet Explorer

18-MAR-05

Here's a bit of encouraging news: Microsoft says that its next web browser, Internet Explorer 7, will be compliant with web standards. My, my, my -- wouldn't that be refreshing?

The main effort toward IE7 will likely still be toward improving security, but there are indications from Microsoft that issues of web standards will also be addressed. Version 6 has languished for several years, neither meeting W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards upon release nor being upgraded during those years.

If you're using IE and haven't tried another web browser, you might want to find out what you're missing. I prefer Firefox from Mozilla. It is CSS2 compliant, so all the beautiful formatting that goes into some web site designs is displayed as intended. For example, static images remain static with CSS2 compliant browsers, permitting some pretty slick design enhancements. Support for CSS2 by IE6 is a marginally better than a bad joke. IE also lacks tabbed browsing, a feature I first encountered with the Firefox browser. This function permits opening several pages in the same window (try it and you'll never go back). The pages are displayed full-size, selectable by tabs at the top. Firefox, and others, have better support for images in the PNG format. Microsoft started talking about full support for PNG around 1998, and has yet to deliver. And what's the story on progressive JPG images that don't display progressively in Windows versions of IE? This shortcoming entirely defeats the design purpose of the progressive JPG format. Duh. (The progressive JPG format permits rapid display of a low-resolution form of the image that is fully rendered in its high-resolution form as the image file is fully downloaded. IE6 for Windows gives you nothing until the file is completely downloaded.)

Most of the complaints about IE6 have come from web site developers. W3C standards provide for and permit very elegant and effective designs. We could author pages to the full set of standards, but the IE users would see degraded results - sometimes truly awful results. And, unfortunately, simply ignoring IE isn't an option; IE represents an enormous portion of the 'net surfing population. So we're kind of stuck with "designing down" to accommodate IE.

If Microsoft does catch up with the rest of the world, we won't have to design down. A W3C compliant IE7 would mean that web site design implementations can improve as the new version gains popularity over IE6. Thus, everyone, including people who don't use IE7, will benefit from more interesting and robust page designs.

But we'll see. Microsoft doesn't always deliver on the talk. I'm pretty satisfied with the MS Windows XP operating system, but not the web browser. I only use MS IE to see what the web pages I design and author are going to look like to the great majority of people who see them. It's time for Microsoft to ditch its third-world browser and adhere to world standards. Even George W appears to be softening on his "go it alone" approach.