01-07-2007, 02:49 PM
Quote:We had taken Microsoft seriously when they warned of inconsistencies in page rendering between IE6 and IE7. Even more so when they announced their intention to distribute IE7 as a high priority automatic update (thereby ensuring that the millions of existing IE6 users would adopt the new browser en mass).Wed therefore downloaded the various public betas and had thoroughly tested the sites that wed built and maintained. Yet we hadnt unearthed any major problems. At least, nothing that couldnt be fixed with a few tweaks.
Maybe weve missed something, we thought. So we spoke to our clients again, finding that many had been approached by design agencies prophesising doom and recommending costly redesign programmes to ensure that their sites would be IE7-ready. At about this time, reports from certain quarters of the media began to surface making similar claims of impending disaster. These articles often likened the automatic update process to Microsoft flicking a switch and bringing down the whole ruddy interweb in one fell swoop.
Quote:By contrast, those sites that have gone some way towards implementing web standards like the Alliance and Leicester, for example are usually in need of a little attention. These sites usually employ (relatively) clean markup, make extensive use of the CSS2 spec and implement certain hacks and filters to support different browsers. They also typically feature a well-formed DOCTYPE. These attempts at standards-compliance throw IE7 into strict mode a mode that has seen significant upgrades in order to meet W3C specs and is therefore quite different to IE6s equivalent. As a result, the presentation of these sites in the two browsers can be quite different. In part two next week well be looking at the reasons why.
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/des...-you-ready