Will it be good enough?

For Internet Explorer 7, the answer may lie with us

At this week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, Bill Gates announced that Internet Explorer 7 will be released this summer as a public beta for Windows XP SP2 a full year before Longhorn is due to be released. IE7 seems to be mainly marketed for security, but many in the design community—myself included—are hoping for a change that is much more important to the future of the World Wide Web: web standards.

The reasons for this announcement most likely have a great deal to do with competition from Mozilla Firefox, and that’s fine—marketplace competition can only be a good thing. With no new versions of Internet Explorer since October 2001, the market was wide open for a new browser to begin to take hold. Firefox is faster, more secure, more feature-rich, and offers very good support for web standards; so in the face of IE6’s massive shortcomings in all those areas, it was inevitable that with the proper push, Firefox would grow to be the major competitor that it is now. Enough of a competitor, at least, to get Microsoft to finally think about updating their browser.

Gates talked a lot about protection against viruses, spyware and phishing scams in IE7, and touched not at all on features that have come to be expected from a web browser in the last 4 years like tabbed browsing or RSS aggregation. All those things are important, but the one thing not mentioned at all was how much support it would have for web standards.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he envisioned it as a common space where users can share information to work together, to play, and to socialise. Only web standards can truly make this possible, and as web developers, creating these sites with standards is what turns this dream into reality. They help ensure that everyone, no matter how they view the web, has access to the same information we provide. They make web development faster and more enjoyable. They allow people to find our sites with ease, since web-crawling “robots” like Googlebot have a much easier time following sites with semantic markup. They do all these things and more, and only through their use can the web continue to grow.

If you take a look at one of the style sheets for this site, you’ll count five instances of CSS rules put there specifically for getting around bugs in Internet Explorer’s CSS rendering. There is an additional workaround in the markup for each page concerning IE’s white-space bug as it applies to lists. And there’s many more with which I fortunately haven’t had to deal. There is even one bug left on my site that only occurs in IE/Win, and I haven’t the slightest idea what’s causing it. (Email me if you would like to help me figure it out.) These issues just do not occur in other, more standards-compliant browsers, and it creates an incredible headache for web designers having to constantly put these workarounds into their sites’ markup and CSS. The design for my site would have finished in around a third of the time if I didn’t have to worry about fixing the way the design displays in IE/Win. For many of us, Internet Explorer 6 is the new Netscape Navigator 4; we begrudgingly make our sites compatible with it only because it’s an incredibly widespread browser.

If Microsoft finally catches up with good web standards support in IE7, then we can finally begin to remove these workarounds from our daily lives and create our sites with pure, semantically-correct CSS. Frankly, I don’t care what the most prevalent browser is—to quote a good friend of mine; “Use Firefox. Use Opera. Get a Mac and use Safari. Hack into the Matrix. I don’t care…”—so long as it has strong support for web standards. All we want is to not have to think about making a site’s design work in any particular browser. “Write once, publish everywhere” was the promise that has been denied to us for at least 10 years now because of broken support for standards.

If we really want a standards-driven web that lives up to the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, we need to set aside our differences and help Microsoft make this release the most standards-compliant yet. If you’re using Windows XP SP2 when the public beta is released, download it, install it, and use it. Use the hell out of it, and when you find problems, report them. Ditch IE7 afterwards if you want, I don’t care; but if IE7 comes out still afflicted with broken standards-compliance, it might just be our own fault, and we’ll have to live even longer with the prospect of building IE workarounds into our sites.