IE 7

The blogs are buzzing about the IE 7 beta that was released with the Windows Vista beta. The hope (however unrealistic) has been that Microsoft will embrace web standards, specifically the entire set of CSS2 rules, and fix at least some of the many bugs IE 6 contains. Position is Everything has a great section detailing IE's bugs.

The bad news is that the IE 7 beta hasn't fixed any of its CSS bugs. As Molly points out, it's a beta so let's not go crazy complaining about what's not working. Microsoft has just begun working with WaSP. That's an important development, and with any luck will impact future IE changes.

Hey, worst case scenario: nothing changes and win IE hacks continue like before and we still can't take full advantage of the breadth of CSS2 (or rather, a significant segment of the viewing audience won't benefit from CSS2). IE 7 beta does support transparency in PNGs, so unless that gets cut (highly doubtful) we're already doing better.

The most important thing we can do to encourage Microsoft and every other browser company out there to embrace web standards, is to spread the word to site developers that CSS+DOM+XHTML benefits everyone. The more voices extolling these standards, the more Microsoft and others will listen.