Posts in the Standards Category

Back when we announced An Event Apart Atlanta, there was a promise of more cities to come:

Can’t make Atlanta on April 3rd? Event Apart seminars in Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles (not necessarily in that order) are up next.

The first of those three has now been announced: An Event Apart Chicago, to be held June 2nd, 2006 at the Gleacher Center right in the heart of downtown Chicago.  Not only will this show reprise the speaker lineup from our Philadelphia show, but our first foray to the Windy City will also feature Jim Coudal as a guest speaker.  He’s a respected Web designer and founder of Coudal Partners, the guy behind Jewelboxing, The Show, and The Deck, and (along with Jason Fried) opened this year’s SXSW Interactive.  He hasn’t chosen his specific topic as I write this, but as far as I’m concerned he can call it “An Hour of Jim Coudal Talking About Whatever The Hell He Wants”.

Registration is already open, so if you’re planning to attend, don’t tarry.  (In fact, just as I went to post this, the first registration came in!)  We have a hard limit on the number of seats available, so when they’re gone, they’re gone.  Much as it pained us, we had to turn away a number of people from the first two Events.  If you want to avoid paining us further, register soon.

• An Event Apart Chicago was published on Monday, March 27th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been five replies.

Over on IEblog, Markus Mielke has a great IE7 post with screenshots of a CSS Zen Garden-inspired layout showing off fixed positioning, PNG alpha channels, arbitrary-element hover, and so much more.  There are those who have called for its inclusion into the Zen Garden, but as Dave points out, it would break in IE6 and so couldn’t qualify as an official design.  Oh, the irony.

Getting back to Markus’ post, he has this to say near the end:

…we are now layout complete with the release of the MIX build – we don’t plan to add more layout features or drastically change layout behavior. This gives web developers a chance to test and prepare your pages for Vista Beta2 and the final release of IE7.  There are still bugs and missing features (display tables, generated content to name a few) we would have liked to do for IE7 but based on your requests to have some lead time to test your pages we need to lock it down now to be able to ship IE7.

So there you go: no more CSS functionality will be added to IE7.  Anything that isn’t there, like CSS table properties and the like, will have to wait for a future version.  As has been publicly stated, though, we won’t have to wait five years for the next version.  There’s no solid guarantee of how long or short a wait there will be, but Bill Gates himself said that new versions would come out more frequently.  The IE team reiterated this.

So will current bugs in IE7’s CSS handling be fixed?  I give that a solid “maybe”.  Markus has left the door partway open by saying that there are no plans to make drastic changes to layout behavior.  That could mean that if a bug fix only causes minor changes, then it might get in.  On the other hand, it could mean that unless existing behavior causes massive problems (or crashes), no bug fixes will be taken until after IE7.  Personally, I wouldn’t count on it, but I’ve been wrong before.

Then, in the same post, Markus drops an entirely new bombshell:

The good news is that we are in the progress of building up a public bug database where you can submit your issues, track their progress and see when we internally fix an issue – Al is going to post about this soon.  Your participation will help us greatly to improve IE and also help us to prioritize what bugs to fix for the next releases.

Sweet fancy Moses—a Bugzilla for IE?  There was no mention of this within my earshot at Mix 06, so I’m as surprised as anyone else.  Did I fall down a rabbit hole and quaff a bottle labeled “DRINK ME”?  If this is a dream, I don’t ever want to wake up.

The Redmond-haters will claim that this is just a lot of catch-up, played years late, and amounts to little more than aping what Mozilla and other browser makers have been doing—better standards support, a tabbed interface, open bug databases, and so on.  It happens that they’re right, but what’s wrong with that?  The IE team has looked over what happened while they were in hibernation and is emulating the best of it.  That’s not lame, that’s smart.  And it should have other browser makers a little bit worried.  A lot of their success has been due to Microsoft’s complacency.  They’re going to have to be a lot sharper and more nimble now that the 800 pound gorilla is actually awake and paying attention to its surroundings.

No, I don’t think IE will wipe everyone else off the map, but I do think the browser space is getting a lot more interesting.  What makes it particularly interesting is that the competition is not going to be over who can add the coolest non-standard geegaws, but who can deliver the best product based on the same standards as everyone else.

I’ve wondered what that would be like ever since I got seriously into standards back in mid-1996.  I almost can’t believe that there’s a chance I’ll get to find out.

• IE7 Improvements and Bug Tracking was published on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-six replies.

Actually, I shamelessly used that title simply because it’s a little play on words.  By and large, my impressions of Mix 06 and what I’ve seen here are positive.  This isn’t my last word on everything going on here, but I wanted to share.  Enjoy!

• You can drag-rearrange tabs in Firefox just by click-and-dragging the tabs.  Seriously, I had no idea.  Thanks to Dan Short for setting me straight on that score.

• In his keynote, Bill Gates said “we need microformats”, which I didn’t even know was on his radar.  For more about that, head on over to microformats.org.

• Microsoft is coming out with a new Windows-only Web design tool called Expression.  It’s pretty slick, with features like visually illustrating margins and padding in the design view and what seemed like smart management of styles.  Unfortunately, I had a little trouble following what it was doing, mostly because I saw it presented in a talk and didn’t have hands-on time.

  Basically, Expression seems to be FrontPage done right, with a relentless focus on standards-oriented design principles. It has its own rendering engine for the design view, and the whole thing was built from the ground up, which means it isn’t trapped by legacy rendering concerns, but it made several of us wonder why that isn’t what they use in IE7.

  I also had trouble mentally distinguishing it from other visual Web design environments like Dreamweaver, but that’s probably because I don’t use a visual design environment.  BBEdit 4-evah, baby!

  Speaking of which, there are no plans to port Expression to the Mac.  Whether that’s good or bad probably  depends on your worldview.  Look for public betas of Expression somewhere in the June 2006 time frame.

• It was publicly stated that the current build of the IE7 beta available from Microsoft is rendering-behavior complete.  In other words, the only changes to IE7 from now until it goes final will be fixes to security holes, crash bugs, and browser chrome/UI stuff.  Whatever its CSS support does or doesn’t do, that’s how the final version is expected to behave.

  Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

I’ll take a few minutes on that last point.  A little while ago, I said that designers should remain calm and not hack their sites to fix them in the IE7 beta because it was a moving target.  That is no longer the case.  It’s now time to start testing sites in the IE7 beta and identifying any layout problems that may occur.  (And there will be problems.  No browser is perfect.)

I’ll be doing this as soon as I can, and I encourage everyone who can to do the same.  Here’s the other key point: IE7 is scheduled to go final in the second half of 2006 (I couldn’t get anything more specific), so we have a calm period of at least three months in which to find out how things stand before IE7 goes final.  This isn’t an accidental circumstance, either.  The IE team has deliberately done this in order to give Web developers time to figure out what’s coming and how to deal with it.

This is entirely in keeping with the new spirit of the IE team, which has impressed me again and again at this conference.  Once upon a time, upgrades to standards support were blocked by the cry “We have customers!”, which was maddening both because it impeded progress and because it was true, as I wrote back in 1998.  The usual counter-argument was that Web designers and developers are customers, too.  We just weren’t (often) treated that way.

Now we are considered customers of the IE team—not the only ones, but important ones.  Not every decision will go our way (even if we had a single “way”, which of course we don’t) but our needs and concerns will be considered.  As further proof besides the “grace period” built into the IE7 timeline, the IE team is creating tools and resources meant to make it easier to update sites for IE7.

I’ll have a good deal more to say about all this in the near future, but those are the big points in my head right now.  I expect to hear Dave‘s, Andy‘s, and Molly‘s takes on all this, and hopefully others will add their thoughts as well.

• Mixed Impressions was published on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, Microformats, and Standards categories.
• There have been fifty-three replies.

Once was lost, now is found: “Images, Tables, and Mysterious Gaps” has been resurrected from the Great Bit Bucket Beyond and given new life on Mozilla.org.  In fact, it looks like just about all the technical articles written by me and the other members of TEDS are available.  Look through the full list of CSS articles, for example.  You can dig into any number of topic areas from the main page of the Documentation section.  (Scroll down to the “Mozilla Developer Center Contents” headline.)

Some other popular articles from my Netscape days gone by:

• Consistent List Indentation
• Defining Cross-Browser Tooltips
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover
• Understanding Underlines
• Liberty! Equality! Validity!

So far as I’ve been able to determine, some of the less technical pieces, like the interviews with Doug Bowman and Mike Davidson, are not available.  Not now, anyway.  Perhaps one day that too will change.

• DevEdge Content Returns was published on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the History, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been six replies.

Registration for AEA Atlanta has been open a week now and one-fifth of the seats are already claimed, so you might want to step up the pressure on your boss.  The early bird deadline won’t be here for another three and a half weeks, but seat availability may not last that long.  (As I’ve mentioned before, it didn’t in Philadelphia.)

Even better, the value of any one of those seats just went up.  How so?  We’ve just announced that we’ll have two (count ’em!) guest speakers joining us: Jason Santa Maria, who delivered one of the highest rated presentations in Philadelphia; and Atlanta native Todd Dominey of Dominey Design, Turner Entertainment, and What Do I Know.

What will they talk about?  You’ll have to come to Atlanta to find out.  Personally, I can’t wait.

• AEA Atlanta Heats Up was published on Monday, February 6th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

So IE7 beta 2 is out.  As you might expect in a beta, it has some things that don’t work as one might hope, whether due to long-standing behaviors or brand new bugs.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: don’t panic.  Trying to fix a site that’s “broken” in IE7b2 is kind of like deciding to raze your profitable gas station just because you heard car companies are experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells.  When the final version of IE7 comes out, then you can worry about what to do.  Maybe your site won’t be “broken” any more, and you won’t have to do anything.

In the meantime, what you should do is figure out what’s causing the problem you’re seeing in b2, create a very minimal test case that causes the problem, and submit that to Microsoft.  By doing that, you give them a chance to identify the problem and fix it before IE7 goes final… at which time, you won’t have to do anything about your site, because it won’t be broken.

That’s if they fix the bug in question.  They might not; they don’t have infinite time and energy.  But I can absolutely guarantee that they’ll never get around to fixing a bug nobody told them about.

In the CSS world, there are some points of concern, including bugs that are new to IE7b2.  The css-discuss community has started collecting information over on the wiki, and if you have test cases that demonstrate CSS bugs in IE7, you should feel free to add information and links to that page.

Before you do, though, make sure to observe the following (adapted from my post to css-discuss):

1. Make absolutely certain you’re testing IE7 beta 2.  IE7b1, which is available for download on various sites, had no known CSS enhancements.  It did not support CSS2.1 selectors, or fix any bugs on which CSS hacks depend, or just about anything else.  If you test with IE7b1, you’re wasting your time.  Again, be SURE you’re testing with IE7b2.

2. If you’re testing property, value, or behavioral support in IE7, make absolutely certain that your test case uses no hacks, filters, conditional comments, or other measures.  If you’re testing float margin-doubling, for example, but you still have in a CSS hack targeted at IE6, you might get completely spurious results. Make your tests as simple as humanly possible while still showing the problem.

3. If you’re testing support for hacks, filters, or conditional comments in IE7, try to make sure you’re testing using simple effects. For example, here’s how I’d test for IE7 support of a child combinator:

      p {color: red; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;
         text-transform: none;}
      div>p {color: green;}
      div > p {font-style: normal;}
      #test>p {font-weight: bold;}
      #test > p {text-transform: uppercase;}
   
      <div id="test"><p>Bold uppercase green</p></div>
      <p>Italic normal case red</p>
   

   This approach uses property/value combinations that we all know IE/Win has supported for a long, long time.  If I tried to test with widths and margins and padding, I’d be concerned that a box model bug was sneaking in and making me think there was a selection bug.  With the color-font-text approach, this is far less likely.  (Not non-zero, but close.)

   Similarly, to test arbitrary-element hover, I’d do nothing more exciting than:

       p:hover {color: green; background: cyan;}
   

4. If you find a new bug, as Al Sparber has with the a:hover/@import problem, absolutely document it with a basic test case (as Al did) and feel free to ask others for confirmation.  But remember the previous points when you construct your test case.

The goal of all this isn’t just to make sure Microsoft knows about every CSS bug under the sun, though that certainly wouldn’t hurt.  What I also hope to see happen is that we get an idea of what’s new, what’s broken, and what absolutely must be fixed.  To pick a hypothetical example, suppose it was discovered that in fixing float margin-doubling, IE7 broke clearing behavior.  That would absolutely have to get fixed before IE7 final.  Doing so would be far more critical than, say, adding support for generated content, or even fixed positioning.

Again, don’t panic, but please do help find any bugs or other problems in IE7b2, so that we have a chance of seeing the problems corrected.

Addenda: so just after I posted this, I found out about the IEblog post What’s New for CSS in Beta 2 Preview? and the in-progress MSDN technical note Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7.  Those might come in handy as a baseline of “here’s what I should see” while you work to find out what you actually see.

• Charting IE7b2 was published on Friday, February 3rd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Registration for AEA Atlanta is now open, so y’all sign up and come see us, y’hear?  It’ll be both a hoot and a holler.  Shoot, we can all have a Coke together.

Just make sure to sign up before March 3rd, unless you want to miss out on the $50 early bird discount.  If you need to exert a little pressure on your boss to cough up the funds, AEA Philadelphia sold out about two weeks before the early bird deadline.

Just sayin’.

• AEA Atlanta Registration Open was published on Monday, January 30th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

That’s right, folks, it’s on.

An Event Apart.  Atlanta.  April.  Alliterative!

We’ve also given a tiny little peek behind the schedule curtain: Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles (not necessarily in that order) will be future AEA stops in 2006.  There may be one or two more in addition to that, but we can’t give away all our secrets, now, can we?  Like the actual dates we’ll be in those cities.  Nope, couldn’t possibly give out those.

Okay, the dates aren’t really secrets.  We just don’t know yet.  Scheduling a road show isn’t an exact science.  There’s a lovely and near-continual juggling act with other travel commitments, venue desirability, and venue availability.  The last thing we’d want is to say we’ll be in City A on Date X, and then have to change it later on.  That’s not simply unprofessional—it’s just plain rude.

Of course, if you’d been subscribed to the AEA RSS feed, you’d already know all this.  In fact, you probably are, and do.  Sorry for the redundancy.  Forget I said anything.

Atlanta!  Be there.  Or, you know, be at one of the future shows.  Either way, we look forward to seeing you!

(P.S.  We know that these are all U.S. cities, and there are many of you in Europe who’d like to have the show come there.  We don’t have any non-U.S. plans yet.  Yet.  One day, maybe, but for now we’re going to stick to the country we know.  It makes calculating taxes a lot simpler, plus there aren’t any awkward customs forms to fill out.)

• AEA: Atlanta Bound was published on Friday, January 27th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.