webqem blog

…And?  you might well ask, perhaps adding derisively ‘Another browser. Woo-hoo. What is it with you nerdy types?’. Well, as it turns out, Microsoft’s new browser offering could potentially cause some headaches that you need to be aware of. We say ‘potentially’ because the browser is only in ‘beta’ at the moment - the final release date is not set at the time of writing - but there are indications it may not display some sites as expected.

Some background

For the last couple of years, most web developers of note have been producing sites using ‘web standards’. We won’t go into detail here - you can find out all about web standards in our very first issue of ‘brief’ (If you don’t know much about what building for web standards means we strongly encourage you to look at that article and, if you’re really keen, head on over to Web Standards Project as well.)

In a perfect world we would be able to use pure, standard mark-up to create sites and all modern browsers would display the site as intended. Whilst we’re edging in that direction we’re not there yet. The increasingly popular Firefox browser is much closer to the agreed standards and IE6 was a big improvement on its predecessors but there are some common workarounds that are used to get sites to display well in IE6. Developers call these workarounds ‘hacks’ and though they’ve been the cause of some angst they have provided a solution for building standards compliant sites that display well in IE6.

The issue

It looks as though Microsoft have seen the light and taken greater strides towards standards compliance in IE7. Fundamentally this is a good thing of course. It means that we can look forward to more standards and less hacking - which means less development time and costs. But, in doing so, many of the hacks we have all been using may now cause the pages to display incorrectly in IE7.

Basically, browsers are supposed to ignore rules that they don’t recognise. It’s this behaviour that has been exploited to workaround some issues within IE6. When IE7 is released it looks as though it might start displaying some of these previously hidden elements and a degree of visual chaos may ensue. It may be that some remedial work will be required. We will continue to keep an eye on the IE7 news and assess the impact for our clients nearer the release date. If you’re a webqem client and your site will be affected we’ll let you know.

Without getting too deep, that’s it in a nutshell. For those of a more technical nature, you can find more information on the problem in this Community MX article.

Further information can also be found on this Microsoft Developers Blog.