Firefox

This is a comment to a blog about web design and it brings up some good points with respect to CSS and IE workarounds.

An update to IE that i.e. incorporates position: fixed or css2 selectors must be separable from earlier versions. Eric states that the few pages that would break after an update, would be fixed by their web designers quickly, because they would be pages maintained by authors who actually want to use standards and care about doing things right. I agree - but if the fix isn’t supposed to break the site for those users that hasn’t upgraded IE, the webdesigner needs something to distinguish the update from its predecessor.

This might not be easy without introducing new problems. A lot of web designers use conditional comments to fix IE-specific problems. A version change - i.e. to 6.1 - would enable them to continue with that approach - but I don’t think Microsoft wants to introduce a new version if the only improvements were “hidden” for the vast majority of the users (as css improvements in the layout engine is).

Another tricky part is whether the bug in IE’s doctype switch - the one that sends IE to quirks mode for any doctype if it finds markup (either a comment or an xml-declaration) before the doctype. A lot of pages makes use of this behaviour - i.e. to trigger quirks mode in an xhtml-document. Other pages - where the designers are not aware of doctype swithing - displays awfully in modern browsers, because they trigger quirks mode on IE but trigger standard mode in all modern browsers.

I too hope that IE will be updated in regards to css - and I believe that Microsoft should do a lot more to advertise an open web. I just think we need to remember that an update wont magically solve our IE problems as web designers - it will just add another version of IE that we have to test and check our sites with.