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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers – Standards Highlights

  • Article

Dean mentioned a bunch of things we are doing in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers. I want to point you to more details specifically about the developer focused changes to CSS, the DOM and the new version targeting.

Standards support (CSS/HTML)

IE8 improves rendering of content authored to various web standards in standards mode. As we have mentioned before, IE8 Beta 1 for Developers ships with standards mode as its default formatting engine. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a special meta element into the web page, that triggers the "IE7 standards mode". For more complete details regarding document compatibility, see Defining Document Compatibility.

While the behavior of the browser is unchanged from Internet Explorer 7 in "IE7 Standards Mode", in standards mode (the default IE8 rendering mode), IE8 supports Data: URIs, the abbr tag, CSS generated content, the display: table CSS properties, in addition to fixing a lot of CSS and HTML parsing bugs.  For a complete list, see CSS Improvements in Internet Explorer 8.  

Standards support (DOM) and AJAX

CSS is not the only place where we tuned IE8, we tweaked the DOM as well.  IE8 features an enhanced and standardized DOM that brings it in line with implementations in other browsers. Highlights include changes in the behavior of the getAttribute, setAttribute and removeAttribute modifiers to make IE8 more interoperable with other browsers.    Additionally, IE8 has dramatically enhanced AJAX support with features like DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM) and the Selectors APIs. For a more complete list of AJAX and DOM improvements, see What’s New in Internet Explorer 8.  

Last but certainly not least, we have added support for the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification. This specification describes how site authors can mark up their content semantically such that users who might use assistive technologies may more completely experience the content. See What’s New for Accessibility in Internet Explorer 8 for a comprehensive discussion of this topic.

It has been great to see all of the wonderful feedback on the beta thus far and remember that IE8 is still a work in progress. Stay tuned for more details here on our blog and on the IE Development Center on MSDN. 

Thanks and Happy Browsing,

Doug Stamper
Principal Program Management Lead
Internet Explorer Developer Experience Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    The BIGGEST issues with the DOM are still BROKEN in IE8.
  • Can't Prototype on ANY DOM Element Level
  • document.getElementById( id ) Still Fails
  • Element.hasAttribute( name ) Still Fails I haven't tested document.getElementsByName( name ) but I'm going to pressume that hasn't been fixed either. Glad to see you had time to ADD NEW FEATURES, before FIXING THE BROKEN / MISSING IMPLEMENTATIONS!
  • Not impressed.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Steve: You need to be using a standards/strict mode document to observe changes/fixes in DOM handling.  

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @steve: Could you provide an example of how getElementById() and hasAttribute() fail?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Steve and Element.hasAttribute().  Test cases would be much appreciated.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Will document.getElementsByClassName be supported? It seems like it should be trivial to do now that you've got the Selector API in.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    When exiting IE8 B1 with multiple tabs, the IE7 feature "Open these next time I use Internet Explorer" is no longer an option...

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Pardon my bluntness, but IE7 was a disaster for right-to-left pages. I've installed the IE8 beta 1, and it seems to be far, far worse. I know it's just a beta, however, so this is merely to bring it to your attention that part of standards is proper support of RTL documents. ...pleease? :-/

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    I agree with Michael C. that, so far, in this first beta of IE 8, right-to-left webpages/tests are not better than in IE 7. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Gerard, @Michael C: RTL is not yet implemented for standards mode pages.  Rest assured, we're very well aware of the importance of this feature.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Will GIF animation speed and PNG gamma support gets fixed by the final release? Also, progressive JPEGs don't display fine mid-loading...

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    yay for display: table support though, it's gonna make a lot of things easier. But, the only reason I'd use table display divs is because IE6/7/8 eats a lot of cpu power displaying normal tables...

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    What i would really like to see added is styling for select boxes, so developers can change the look of the button, drop down, and border of select elements.  Color is most important to me, but it would be nice if we could stick images into select structures as replacement for the default arrow button and as entries for the option tags.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    text-overflow seems to be broken, or is this a general overflow issue? Data-URI's seem to be too restricted to be of any use. XDM looks proprietary, why not follow the W3C's Web Application Formats WG efforts? What's up with the increase of the max connections per host of the (RFC compliant) 2 to 6? It that only for XHR or general? Is it to get a perceived performance advantage over other browsers which still default to 2? Why didn't MS discuss or announce any of these changes (also wrt DOM storage, ARIA and changed parsing rules) to the various W3C WG's MS is also participating in? And when is MS finally going to present it's comments on the HTML5 WD (which I believe was due August of last year)?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Tino: DataURLs are primarily useful for embedding small images into CSS for use as icons, etc; IE8 permits this use.  Unfortunately, for some content types, DataURLs can be dangerous, which is why IE8 scopes them to use where they are not a security threat.   Note that there are many cases where using a DataURL will actually be LESS performant than using a HTTP URL with appropriate caching and compression headers. XDM is part of the HTML5 specification.  Search for "onMessage" for more information. The change to the per-host connection limit applies to all HTTP/HTTPS traffic, not just that from XHR.  RFC2616 suggests that user-agents "SHOULD" (not MIST) limit themselves to 2 connections per server.  The RFC2616bis working group is currently deliberating over removing that suggestion, as the characteristics of the Intranet have changed significantly since this implementation guidance was provided.  Opera defaults to 8 connections per host, and Firefox will dynamically scale up to 8 as well.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Ahem... typo "MUST" not "MIST" above. :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hello, (For bug numbers, please refer to my IE 7 bug website) Bugs (#51, #72, #79) regarding text increase/decrease or related to EM have not been fixed. Some testcases have border disappearing: bug #101 (which is fixed! thank you!) but now, we do not see the border... which must be another bug surfacing, appearing. bug #15 is also another example of border disappearing, reappearing. If the last character of a block-level element is a exclamation mark, question mark, period or comma, or some other typical ponctuation character/sign, then it can not be selected/highlighted with the mouse when dragging the text. Eg.: <h1>Hello World</h1> is entirely selectable/highlightable with a mousedown+mousedrag from left to right or from right to left. But <h1>Hello World!</h1> and the ! is not selectable/highlightable with mousedragging. It can be easy to provide lots of tests of this buggy behavior. Bug #102 is now worse: hovering the mouse cursor hover the padding-left area does not trigger the :hover class but hovering the mouse cursor over the  padding-right area does trigger the :hover class. This must be a regression. I have other tests in which the same regression is noticed. Bugs #49 and #67 are not fixed: when a link is styled with display: block, then its padding area should be reactive to :hover. There is something wrong going on, definitely a regression, with list markers and with images as list-style-image. a) previous list marker is duplicated when hovering the mouse over a list item in bug #67 b) list-style-image is not visible, viewable in bug #68. Others elsewhere have also mentioned problems with list-style-image. Best regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    getElementById(), hasAttributes() and attributes as a NamedNodeMap are not correctly implemented. See bugs #13, #54 and #55 respectively at my IE 7 bug webpage for testcases. Many other DOM attributes and methods are still not correctly implemented: see bugs #23, #24, #26, #30, #42, etc. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Still Waiting for one of those elusive invites to file bugs in the public bug tracking system. I must say that I am far from impressed about how the bug tracking system works this time around. At least last time I could file a bug.  Now I just get to sit here and hope that someone files the bugs I've seen. Where's Al when you need him?... oh, never mind, he works for a company that has a FULLY PUBLIC BUG TRACKING SYSTEM now. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    My last comment doesn't seem to have gotten through: will you support document.getElementsByClassName? It should be trivial, now that the Selector API is in. Also, whatever happened to inline find? Is that still a go?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Gerard, Glad to see I'm not the only one! Once again, we would file a bug report in the bug tracker, BUT WE DON'T HAVE ACCESS!

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Margin-bottom is no longer rendered in http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/Opera9Bugs/MarginBottom.html This appears to be a regression. Padding-right is no longer rendered in http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/Opera9Bugs/Opera9PaddingRightMisrendered.html This appears to be a regression. <object height="100%"> is rendered with only 75 pixels. See/just load http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/20070302/sec44.htm This appears to be a regression. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @ Steve I believe I have access to a Microsoft IE bug tracker system of some sort, somewhere ... not sure... I was invited to - if I understood this correctly - ... but anyway, I prefer my own website for all this. So, as soon as I have more time, I'll list the bugs, upload testcases at my IE 8 bug webpage. hasAttribute() seems to be correctly implemented: at least, I see no problems or issue. But hasAttributes() is different and it has at least one bug. "Not yet fixed bugs" are one category of bugs; regression bugs are more important bugs, I would say, and represent a more urgent category of bugs to tackle, eradicate. So, in that sense, I fully understand why Microsoft IE team did not implement DOM 2 Events for this beta. When there are so many bugs to be fixed, tackled, investigated, it is understandable that you want to restrict bug fixing to delimited areas and to "advance" methodically, in a structured manner. IE 6 and IE 7 had well over 750 bugs (most likely around 1250 bugs of all sorts); so, a first beta can not aspire to fix everything... it's not a realistic goal, it would be too wild, too complex, too demanding. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Gyrobo, John A. Bilicki III: inline search and spell checker are included in the very useful add-on IE7pro. Furthermore this adds a whole lot of other features that are probably also in the list of most downloaded FF extensions :) And Eric Law: Could you point to where data: URIs have been a security threat in browsers that implement them? The only thing I found was an address spoofing flaw in Opera and I don't mind the fact that data: URIs don't work from the address bar, as this is probably not their primary use. But predicting that data URIs won't have any use outside of image/ MIME types might be a bit bold, I think.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hotmail / IE 8 compatibility issues known defect?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @@Johannes-- he said -primarily- not -only-... did you bother searching for the bugs over at Bugzilla? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277999 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255107 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371923 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380369 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371179 etc etc etc.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Dynamically disableing a command button does not work: the command button still receives + fires onclick event. Dynamically defaultChecking a command button does not work: this worked in IE 7. For a demo for both problems with/in IE 8, see bug #21 at my webpage. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    According to HTML 4 spec. (section 11.3.2), the default vertical-alignment for table header cells is middle, not top. "middle: Cell data is centered vertically within the cell. This is the default value." Default vertical alignment value for all table header cells was middle in IE 7. Now, in IE 8, default vertical alignment value for table header cells is top. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @Johannes Rössel Thanks, but I'm aware of the plug in. I remember hearing about inline find being something the IE team really wanted to include natively. Just wondering if that was on the menu. @IE Team And what's with the grayed-out address bar? That "feature" was backed out of Firefox a year ago because it hinders readability. Plus, it doesn't even highlight subdomains! Completely USELESS for blogs. I hope you'll reconsider this functionality.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    How come max- and min-widths/heights aren't in the list of CSS fixes? They must be fixed since IE8 passes Acid2...

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    @David, those properties are already part of IE7 as far as I know.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hello IE8 team, This is probably not exactly the right place to post what I'm going to post, but at least I'm sure someone from the IE team will read it. So, let's go. First, congratultions for the software. Great work. The tools for developers are really awesome! I'm going to try to add slices to my own site. It's too bad that they made you back down on the issue of default rendering engine, though. IMHO, it's really too early to make IE8's rendering engine the default. Probably this has to do with Opera and its EU action. Now I guess you mostly have to fix bugs and make the whole think work much quicker. As far as I can say, IE8 as a software is slower than IE7 as a software, and, within IE8, IE8 rendering is slower than IE7 rendering. Contrarily to what people say on the Web, IE7 in my experience was indeed quicker than FireFox. I hope IE8 will keep the edge once in the release version. Apart from that I've noticed two things on which it's probably worthy that I give you some feedback:

  1. negative text-indents are not correctly displayed by the IE8 rendering engine when viewing my site on my computer (scroll down the main column of my site to witness this). Sometimes they display, sometimes not, varies as I scroll; which makes me say it's propably not a standards-compliance issue with my site. Negative text-indents are standard aren't they? I guess they shouldn't be cut part of the time like they are.
  2. Italic text is (at least sometimes) cut at the end of lines. See the links on the right column of my site for an example. I hope it does it also for you. I guess there is some weirdness with the way inline boxes are rendered, but hey, you know your job better than I. FYI, if ever it matters, I'm using XP sp2. Besides, I have a two questions that someone from Microsoft or someone better skilled than I am can probably answer:
  3. I don't understand the View menu of the developer tools window. Does skipping to quirks mode automatically amount to viewing my site as rendered by IE5? I would say no myself, because some incorrect or non-existing DTD is required for a navigator to skip to quiks mode, and my site has a correct DTD; but I'm far for being an expert.
  4. I've read many times that IE8 enables me the viewing of my site as rendered by IE6. How do I achieve this?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    What i would really like to see added is styling for select boxes, so developers can change the look of the button, drop down, and border of select elements.  Color is most important to me, but it would be nice if we could stick images into select structures as replacement for the default arrow button and as entries for the option tags.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hey um, I registered on thet Connect site; but I can't file a report. Also I can't start a new thread on the Maillist, the new-thread-Button doesn't work!

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hi, In 2005, Chris Wilson said that Internet Explorer 7 wouldn't have XHTML media type support[1].  This didn't sound at all unreasonable to me, as the IE team had other priorities. Now the IE8 beta 1 is out, I note that support hasn't been added, but work has been done to add XML-ish namespace support to regular HTML.  (This is a little unexpected, given that neither the HTML 4 Recommendation nor the current HTML 5 drafts have any such feature!) Can you please let us know what's going on.  Is this part of a plan working to add XHTML support in a future beta?  Or does Microsoft no longer intend to support this standard? Thanks. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/15/467901.aspx

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    overflow:hidden and opacity isn't working in IE8

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hey Gérard, can you please contact me through my site? I can't find any way to contact you through yours. I'd like to discuss IE8 and bugs. :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    id like to know how many ppl work on the ie team

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    More specifically a DIV with overflow:hidden ignores the property when the content in the DIV is a UL with position:relative. overflow:scroll and auto works fine though.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Hi Doug Stamper, My suggestions to the next build of IE 8 beta when to click with shift key + left button mouse in to link:

  • to open new pages new tabs instead of new windows as presented currently. When browser is minized:
  • Hide it in an icon in the task bar.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Frank: Ok, I have to admit, I resorted to a simple Google search, turns out that most things either aren't indexed or not linked enough (and the experience of digging through Bugzilla myself was ugly enough for me one time I filed a bug :)) Álisson P. F.: Especially that last feature will probably never see IE natively. The notification area is defined in the UX guidelines as reserved for ... well ... notifications. If you desperately want that functionality, there are 3rd party plug ins out there that do that. You can click links with the middle mouse button or use Ctrl-click to open them in a new tab. This is consistent with other browsers and works since IE 7.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    @EricLaw: "DataURLs are primarily useful for embedding small images into CSS for use as icons, etc; IE8 permits this use.  Unfortunately, for some content types, DataURLs can be dangerous, which is why IE8 scopes them to use where they are not a security threat." I was more talking about the 32KB limit which doesn't really make it a viable option to compensate for the lack of <canvas> and native SVG. 32KB won't let you generate things like complex graphs and such, even when you use a compressed imageformat like PNG or GIF (I actually do have a GIF implementation in javascript that uses data-url's to show the image :P) instead of a simple format like BMP. I haven't really compared IE8's implementation to those in other browsers yet so I don't really know what restrictions they impose, but at least they offer alternatives. "Note that there are many cases where using a DataURL will actually be LESS performant than using a HTTP URL with appropriate caching and compression headers." I know that, but I had other usecases in mind ;) "XDM is part of the HTML5 specification.  Search for "onMessage" for more information." But then why isn't IE8's implementation following the HTML5 specification? I noticed several differences and Anne van Kesteren confirms my initial findings ( http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad ). MS is acting again like the big gorilla in the room doing as they please without consulting the WG. Effectively they are again forcing their interpretation upon the world leaving the WG no choice but to alter the specification to IE's implementation on several points. That is bypassing the WG to get what you want without having to reach concensus on possible issues and is actually hurting the standards process and interoperability (again). The same goes for MS' decision to increase the per-host connection limit. You've effectively already decided over RFC2616bis WG deliberations, probably without having participated in that debat. Although I understand the reasoning behind this change it's more the way that MS is again making this decision on it's own as if they own the web. Afaik Firefox still ships with the default set to 2 (although that can be changed in the configuration or by using some extensions), I don't know about Opera.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    the emulate IE7 seen it dos not want to work i down lode the new IE8  and i did re start it when i got done down lodeing it  like it ask me to but it seen lie it dos not want to work do i need to down  lode any thing???

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Use of RGB values is broken in the IE8 beta. http://blog.websitestyle.com/index.php/2008/03/08/ie8-beta-broken-rgb-color/

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    @Nicole, I too can verify that there are issues with RGB color values in IE8. I also noted that asking for an attribute via getAttribute() won't necs. return the same thing you set. in the case of style, if you pass in "border: 1px solid #ff0000;" it will return MSIE's broken UPPERCASE PROPERTY names exploded for each top, bottom, left, right. e.g. "BORDER-TOP: 1px solid #ff0000; BORDER-RIGHT: 1px solid #ff0000; BORDER-BOTTOM: 1px solid #ff0000; BORDER-LEFT: 1px solid #ff0000;" Its a minor thing, but something to keep in mind since IE already does strange stuff with form element's value attributes, if the user has typed something in.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    @Tino: The 2-connection per host suggestion in RFC2616 is a SHOULD, not a MUST requirement. I've already noted that both Firefox and Opera have surpassed the 2 connection limit, so implying that IE is somehow unique in this regard is incorrect. There's no real dissent in the HTTP WG related to removing the connection limit.  See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2008JanMar/0423.html for the discussion.   In http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2008JanMar/0429.html, Roy Fielding (whose name you'll find atop RFC2616) says: "in regards to the topic, I see no reason for the connection limits." Please note, Anne's post does not make ANY mention of IE8's support for HTML5 Cross-Document-Messaging.  For any of you who might not be aware (and because it is not mentioned on his post), Anne is an employee of Opera Software ASA.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Is there any chance the IEBlog could introduce some new blog categories (tags)? For instance I might want to see all the posts relating to IE7, or newly supported CSS properties, or user interface changes, Add-ons, etc... Some of the existing tags are quite vague as well, what can one expect to find in "IE on the Web"? Everything except Intranet-related posts? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Nice beta. I have had a few pages not display properly,  but I was able to track those down to non-standard coding. The only pages that REFUSE to work properly are live.com and hotmail, LOL.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Ok, I'm getting real impatient about this now. What is the deal with the invites to submit bugs?  (no offense to Gerald) but how come the people that want to submit bugs can't submit bugs?  This seems totally counter intuitive! My invite status in Connect just sits there, with no activity, just status=active, while I wait for approval. I'm flabbergasted that you shut this thing down for over a year, and when you open it up, you don't even make it public!?!?!? Did none of the ranting on this blog by just about everyone not indicate that they would like to participate in this process? For the record, I'm fine if you reject my request to enter tickets... but at least provide the professional courtesy to let us know that you are blocking us from entering them, and give an explanation as to why! Steve C.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but in IE8's version of Standards mode, the following are still messed up. .setAttribute() for "cellpadding", "cellspacing" (on tables), as well as "style"... which sometimes get confused as an object, esp. when calling object.getAttribute('style') which should return a string, not IE's deprecated quick access to the style object that you might expect when using object.style Where is the full list of what is fixed, and what is still broken in IE8? Where can I file these bugs with test cases so others can verify these bugs, and IE developers can verify that the fixes in Beta 2 address these? Manuel

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    @Steve C I would venture a guess that if any invites are being given out, it's to participants on here with an established, consistent, "Identity" with contact information of some type that's contributed to this blog in a constructive way with given examples.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    What about finally making IE ICM-aware? Try and go to http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    What HTML5 tags and attributes do you support? I'd like to use them on my website.

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2008
    @Steve C [QUOTE]but how come the people that want to submit bugs can't submit bugs? They should definitely reconsider this. As someone else said, you have to wait and hope someone else posts the issue you want to report and then vote on it ;-) IE8b1 has many problems and they won't even be known unless (all) volunteers can freely report these issues on the Connect website. If they actively moderate/clean the issue reports then the volume increase would be manageable. Right now I can't do anything but ... "report a website problem" :D

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    Nice to see the IE8 beta.. I'm using it now.. seems nice and smooth.. BUT can you please implement that "page title" functionality where the title of the page appears right to the URL when you pull the drop down menu of the address bar. This is implemented in some other browsers (FFox) and its really helpful when going through a long list of unfriendly URLs in the address bar's drop down to have the title of the page. It simply fetches the <title> tag of that particular page and shows it. Hope I made enough sense :)

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @MacDaddy: I thought I was quite civilized in my posts and already admitted that I wasn't aware of the fact(?) that other browsers already went beyond the 2 per-host limit, that's exactly why I asked for some references. Fwiw, I still think that 'SHOULD' is quite a strong directive and that's why I think that on points where the specifications 'allows' (as in: doesn't prohibit by using 'MUST') you to be more loose implementations should be more equal. I can pinpoint several items in several RFC's where IE's implementation is either more slack or more strict than those in other browsers and that seems to me to be a bad thing. I know that there is more and more colobaration  between browservendors to resolve those kind of interoperability issues, but Microsoft just doesn't seem willing to participate in such efforts, which to me is disappointing at least.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    And on a sidenote: I'm already doing quite some investigation on several items regarding IE8 in my spare time. It's very time-consuming and I'm sorry that I haven't really focussed on the good things. I'm just trying to get as much information I can before I can really make judgements on detailed points. At this point the only judgement I made is that MS is not really into colobaration with the other browservendors and the several W3C WG's they're participating in. We've seen what that leads to in the past, and even recently wrt the X-UA-Compatible flag were they had to revise that behaviour for several reasons. I hate to see MS making those same mistakes when implementing other new features or changing existing behaviour.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    when will Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 be out ???

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    Now that's something good to hear. Now just make sure you fixed the damage you've already done and get everyone to update (when the public version is done).

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    When there is a MASS posting like the past 2-3 days, you really need a TOC (Table Of Contents) for this blog, as major info gets lost in the blur of posts. If you had a recent posts section on the right, listing say the past 8-10 posts, readers would be able to see at a glance the last post they read, and what they've missed. Thus as of Sunday March 9th, the list would look like:

  • Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers – Standards Highlights

  • Improved Productivity Through Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools

  • The Default Layout Mode

  • IE8 and CSS 2.1 Testing

  • IE8 and JScript

  • Activities and WebSlices in Internet Explorer 8

  • IE8 and IP Licensing

  • Why Isn't IE8 Passing Acid2?

  • IE8 Beta Feedback

  • Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Developers Now Available I was reading the feedback on the "IE8 Beta Feedback" post... by the time I was done (read over a few days)... 7 or 8 more posts had sailed through! Thanks, ivan

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    Once again the Connect site has proven to be the worst public bug tracking system ever! Not only can we not log in to submit bugs, but even viewing them is messed up. Just how am I supposed to view a screenshot or a test case if there is no link to the file? What gives?! Are you seriously telling us that in the time since IE7 was announced as being "On the roadmap", that no one has spent ANY time putting something together to manage this whole process? I can't believe it is 2008 and IE is the only major browser without a realistic public bug tracking system. Talk about your prime candidate for a feature on the dailywtf!

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    ... I sent the live.com team a note yesterday to talk to Dean, Chris, Alex & Markus.  If Microsoft wants to hire me for being an inside man let me know:)  I just like learning about how you all do business.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @Manuel "You can't set the style attribute on a TABLE tag in IE8's version of Standards mode." "the following are still messed up. .setAttribute() for "cellpadding", "cellspacing" (on tables), as well as "style"." Manuel, that is not what I see, notice at these webpages: http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/CreatingTable.html http://www.gtalbot.org/DHTMLSection/DynamicTableFormatting.html Of course, some functions do not work perfectly but overall, I can set the style of a table object and table cell objects. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    It would be great, if the IE8 team should be working on XHTML support, but please don't add HTML namespace support in IE8 final. If you honestly intend to have namespaces in HTML, then please coordinate this with the HTML5 WG. Personally, I even think that xml-like namespaces would be great to have in plain html, because this would hopefully keep the use of microformats at a tolerable level and instead add a reasonable to use html extensions, But such changes should be introduced in the proper way and it would be dangerous to introduce an unspecified xhtml/html hybrid mode of parsing.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @Steve, Still Waiting and all those who want to file bugs in the public bug tracking system. Create a reduced testcase of the bug you see: shorter is usually better. Make sure there is a clear PASS and clear FAIL in such minimized testcase: the test should be easy to figure out for anyone. Make sure your markup code and CSS code are perfectly valid. Your reduced testcase should be using a doctype declaration (preferably) referring to a strict DTD. Upload it on your website. I'm sure now Microsoft is looking for such testcases. Again, the best ones are the ones that are short preferably minimalist, clear, easy to figure out, using valid code, identifying only 1 bug per testcase. Be as factual and as formal as you can in such testcases. In longer testcases, clearly identify steps to reproduce and expected results. CSS2.1 Test Case Authoring Guidelines http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/guidelines.html If you do that, I'm absolutely sure Microsoft will appreciate such testcases and fix the bugs because such testcases help not only figuring out bugs but to fix them and to verify that they are fixed. 2 examples (from Nicole's report): http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE8Bugs/ShorthandBackgroundAndRGB-1.html 411 bytes http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE8Bugs/ShorthandBackgroundAndRGB-2.html 328 bytes

Other idea. You can still report your good, clear testcases with the Report a webpage problem (in IE add-on) http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/ResourcesAndLinks.htm Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @Thompson I agree with you that the Connect IE Bug database reporting/feedback website is not an ideal or even just a good bug database reporting website. But complaining at this point is not going to be useful, helpful to anyone. At the very least, identify what is wrong/incorrect with that Connect bug tracking system and what you would improve in it and how you would improve it (hints: make useful, constructive criticisms, be suggestive, preferably with concrete proposals, concrete proposals, examples, screenshots, etc) and do so preferably at the best place, at the opportune moment. A good place to do all this would be on your own website. If you want to report bugs, you still can do it in many ways (read the other IE blog messages pointing to IE8 documentation webpages). Download and install the Report a webpage problem (with IE add-on). File your bugs with that "Report a webpage problem" IE add-on. Create your own webpage/testcases on your site. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    I am trying to use the Emulate IE7 as some of the pages I was trying to visit were broken. Identified 3 important issues.

  1. When I use the vertical scroll bar it comes down but again it goes on to the top. It happens randomly
  2. When I use favorites it crashes my IE
  3. I think still it has some issues displaying CSS based sites. The width and the height are a bit abnormal to what I see with Ie7. The Emulate IE7 doesnt work exactly as its expected to work. Hope this feedback helps.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    A question... if the developer toolbar can switch between IE7 and IE8 rendering at will, why can't the IE7 emulation button do this, only after restarting the browser?

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @html namespaces are dangerous -- IE has supported namespaces in HTML documents since IE 5 (1999).  The only thing that they are doing in IE8 is allowing these custom elements to function without IE-specific goo (an Object tag to pull in the behavior, and an Import directive to associate the behavior with the namespace). I've heard some HTML5 folk complaining about supporting namespaces in HTML but still haven't heard a good argument against it.  Frankly, it would be better if HTML5 would focus on the basics (interoperable error handling, clarification to undefined behaviors, etc) and include an extensibility mechanism (namespaces) so that the remaining "goodies" (video tag, etc) could be implemented separately from the main spec. Incidentally, IE has supported a video tag (the SMIL video tag) via HTML+TIME since 1999.  Why this video tag isn't "good enough" for the HTML5 folk, and why they feel the need to re-invent the wheel, is beyond me.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    How can i hide the horizontal... scroll bar... it shows up... even if not needed... thx...

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    How can I hide the horizontal scroll bar?...

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/09/2136242 looks like some bad press

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    @gabe Bad press? About Microsoft? On Slashdot? Inconceivable!

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    Yea, this horizontal scroll thing is killing me. how did that make it to a beta?

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    "My only real issue is that a page designed in Expression Web (XHTML/CSS2.1) looks different in IE7 and IE8. So I'm hoping its not soon going to be a case of having to design for IE7, IE8 and FX (what's Opera?)." One word: meta "Comformance with standards is great, but who decides on the standards? Surely it should be the first team to fully develop a procedure, not a bunch of over-educated tie-wearing monkeys with nothing better to do than agree with each other about nothing." That's brilliant! Congratulationz, you win a cookie!

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    RE > Gérard Talbot Very constructive work - a job well done.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Ken: Privileging Opera 9 over IE6 is currently not realistic at all for most commercial/professional sites. IE6 still has over 1/3 of market share, compare that with Opera's 1%... But yeah, for a personal site, it can be done. Dean Edward's (updated) IE7 JavaScript is also a nice way to bypass many limitations of IE6 and 7. As for Opera, with its 1% of market share, it's hard to justify tweaking your site just for it. Personally, at work, I only bother fixing the site if Opera is right to display it as broken. If it's obviously an Opera bug, I don't bother. And since Opera cares about standards, chances are they'll end up fixing things on their side. However, on a side note, Opera's closed bug-tracking system is a pain to work with.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-001 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Element.hasAttibute('style'); returns false when Element has a style attribute set.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-002 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: TableElement.setAttibute('style','...'); does not correctly set the style attribute on the table.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-004 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Element.innerHTML; returns UPPERCASE tagnames, not what was set (lowercase), this occurs regardless if it is the original HTML sent on the response or dynamically added via JavaScript

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-005 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: TableElement.setAttibute('class','...'); does not correctly set the class attribute on the table.  Works on other elements.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-006 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Element.setAttribute('on{eventName}','handler'); Sets the HTML attribute but does not register the event handler with the Element. Setting event handlers like this in HTML works fine, thus not supporting it fully via JavaScript is a bug, especially since it does store the attribute value.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-008 IE8B1: Scope: Browser UI Synopsis: User can't select a hyperlink on screen  and drag-n-drop to anywhere except the favorites bar (bar only), or another application outside IE8. Minor exception, user can drag and drop to the 1 pixel bottom border underneath the IE8 tab row.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-009 IE8B1: Scope: Browser UI Synopsis: User can't right click on an iframe (or frame) and choose an option to view that frame in another tab or window.  This is a major usability issue when trying to view specific contents, or trying to print a specific frame only.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Jack T Some of the 'bugs' you are reporting aren't actually bugs. Sure, they're good usability points, but the IE team have never announced they were introducing drag and drop text, and the like.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    I see no mention of supporting the standard DOM 2 event model (Element.addEventListener(), Event.target, bubbling, capturing, that sort of thing).  I'm wondering if we can expect any movement in that direction.  Maybe a later beta, or IE 9?

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Mike They haven't announced the ability to drag and drop text or hyperlinks... no, however these are regression issues that creeped* into IE7, and have not be fixed in IE8. When IE7 was being released MS indicated that they did lose UI functionality when they added tabs.  They were sorry that it didn't make it into the rushed IE7 RTM release, but getting a new version out was the priority. Thus here we are with IE8 on the horizon, and these issues have not been addressed. Regardless, a bug by definition, is any non-expected behavior.  It may be resolved as a non-issue if the new/odd behavior has a rationale to support it, but in this case there is no respectable reason why drag-n-drop of text, and in particular hyperlinks is not appropriate when other browsers (including IE) have supported this for ages.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    I thought hasLayout was finally dropped in IE8 Standards mode? If I do: javascript:alert('Has Layout? ' + window.document.body.currentStyle.hasLayout); IE8 in standards mode returns true. So what's the story, is it dropped, or not?

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-010 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: SelectElement.setAttibute('style','...'); does not correctly set the style attribute on the select element.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-011 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Setting the style (via style.setAttribute('cssText') due to bug JT-010) on a Select element changes the chrome (on XP pro) rendering of the drop arrow, if the background color, or border is changed. The chrome does not get altered if the font is changed (font face or color), width, or height, etc.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-012 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: SelectElement.setAttibute('class','...'); does not correctly set the class attribute on the select element.  Works on other elements (except Table as noted in bug JT-005).

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Bug Report: JT-015 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Potential security issue/spoofing ability.  On any page with an iframe, you can set the src to "about:Tabs" which renders the first time user screen for a new tab.  A malicious page could render "what appears to be" the new tab page, whilst JavaScript in the parent container page does undesired things. (e.g. launching random popup ads.) (Minor issue)

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    Thank you, IE team, for pushing through this decision and reverting your earlier decision. Strict/standards mode is much easier to opt into and is a fair compromise. It's bad enough that web developers will have to be testing for IE6 for years to come, much like the slow death of IE5. It feels like this will finally start moving the web forward.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @@JackT #15: How is that even ~remotely~ a security or spoofing issue?  The bad guy could just as easily serve the same HTML instead of going to about:tabs.  And the popup blocker would block the popups from the outer page anyway... there's no need to show the new tabs page, as it doesn't get the attacker anything...

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Alan G I made pretty simple test case for IE8 with CSS tables, check this out: http://www.rowanw.com/bugs/ie8b1-display-table-cell.htm Definitely broken.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Jack T. 1- Have you tested Element.hasAttibute('style'); or Element.hasAttribute('style'); ? What's the URL of your testcase? Can you upload it somewhere? 2- Have you tested TableElement.setAttibute('style','...'); or TableElement.setAttribute('style','...'); ? setAttribute() works as expected and as specified by the spec on style at http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/tests/attributesBasics.html#setAttribute() 3- Have you tested TableElement.setAttibute('class','...'); or TableElement.setAttribute('class','...'); ? etc. Can you provide URLs for those tests of yours? We know that Element.hasAttributes(); does not work as expected: see bug #54 at my webpage

Regarding "User can't right click on an iframe (or frame) and (...)": that would be a feature request; not a bug like a spec violation or incorrect implementation. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Rowan border-spacing and border-collapse properties only apply to "table" elements and "inline-table" elements. They do not apply to table-cell elements. Also, the default border-collapse value is separate. So, your whole CSS code can be reduced to table {border-spacing: 0;} which is the initial, default value of border-spacing. I'm afraid your testcase needs work. Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Gérard Thanks, I forgot to remove the extra CSS, I was experimenting. ;)

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    I find this one kinda funny: "Bug Report: JT-004 IE8B1: Scope: JavaScript Synopsis: Element.innerHTML; returns UPPERCASE tagnames, not what was set (lowercase), this occurs regardless if it is the original HTML sent on the response or dynamically added via JavaScript" Not only is innerHTML a proprietary property invented by Microsoft (meaning it can return whatever Microsoft wants), HTML 4.01 has no case sensitivity in tag names.  The browser can return eVeRy oThEr letter uppercase if they'd want to and it would be perfectly valid. It's a nice request, but why should the parser keep track of the case that each element was parsed in at?  I imagine that the element uses an enumeration (e.g. ELEMENT_TAG_ID, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa769842(vs.85).aspx) to internally store what type of tag it is; for each element to have to keep track of the case-sensitive string of the tag name would be a waste of memory.

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    @Gerard Yes I have tested all the .setAttribute bugs outlined above! (JT-001, JT-002, JT-003, JT-004, JT-005, JT-006, JT-010, JT-011, JT-012, JT-013, JT-014) Thats how I found them!  Not to mention that making my applications work in IE8 standards mode required me to tweak my code. I had a wrapper for setAttribute, that fixed all bugs outlined in bug 242 (here) http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2007/08/bug-242-setattribute-doesnt-always-work.html Which works great for IE6, IE7.  I foolishly removed the ENTIRE wrapper for IE8, and found things broke right left and center. Anyway, I do have test cases, but I'm not going to upload any of them until I get an invite to IE Feedback on Connect (or it goes public).  The WHOLE purpose of a centralized bug tracking system is that there is ONE location where EVERYONE can view/add/edit bugs testcases and workarounds.

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
    Francis, moving focus from/to chrome is done in IE with F6 and works since at least IE6. Navigating and controlling the browser by dictation is works with IE 7 on Vista.

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
    How about the last-child pseudo class?  I find this useful in cases where i have a div with multiple p tags (margin-bottom: 15px) within and I wish to remove the bottom margin for the last element in the div so i don't get extra padding.

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
    Hi! I'm having trouble with the installation of IE8 beta. Everything seems to work well (including "Updates are being configured ..."), but after the Reboot nothing has chenged - still IE7 in place. Any hints or ideas? Greetings Gunther

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
    @Francis I've been using IE sans mouse since IE 6. I thought the keys were more or less known, but maybe it's just my being used to them. I always found Opera kind of awkward that way because of it.

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2008
    I know there have already been some test pages posted for this problem, but I've made my own that I hope makes the problem really clear. http://patrick1978.com/ie8test.html Unfortunately I have yet to see this bug posted to the MS Connect Site so I can't vote on it or enter it myself, otherwise I would.

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2008
    Adriaan, Instead of just complaining, why not actually post what the issue is, or better yet test cases (assuming you have the skill for that)? Do you remember how lousy FF 3 beta 1 was?

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2008
    @ Lee You said: " How about the last-child pseudo class?  I find this useful in cases where i have a div with multiple p tags (margin-bottom: 15px) within and I wish to remove the bottom margin for the last element in the div so i don't get extra padding. " CSS 2.1, margin collapsing is now fully supported and correctly implemented in IE 8. So, what you are asking for no longer needs to be worked around or coded for. "The bottom margin of an in-flow block-level element (...) is adjoining to its last in-flow block-level child's bottom margin if the element has no bottom padding or border." CSS 2.1, section 8.3.1 Visit my webpage and bug #36 to verify for yourself Regards, Gérard

  • Anonymous
    March 19, 2008
    Looking at IE8 for the first time, I work as a web developer and am trying to ensure that our web applications will work with the new browser. Thinking that I would have to create yet another style sheet to ensure my sites are rendered correctly you can imagine my joy when I heard about the X-UA-Compatible method. That Joy was however shortlived. Contrary to the documenation changing this mode to IE7 does not render the site as the shipped version of IE7 does... could you explain why this is, if it doesn't render the same then I realy don't see the use of it and its extremely frustrating to be led down the garden path like this... Has anyone else noticed this and is there any plan to resolve this before IE 8 hits the market???? Things like this cost small business like mine thousands in lost man hours!

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2008
    After some further testing I've updated my test page to be much more descriptive of the CSS background/RGB color problem, and to test more combinations of background declarations. http://patrick1978.com/ie8test.html

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2008
    Our friends over in the Internet Explorer building recently released a developer preview version of IE8.

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2008
    With the release of IE8 Beta 1, I'm pleased to be able to talk about the first round of improved standards

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2008
    This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The topic is complicated