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IE7 "Layout Complete"... ATLAS "Go-Live"... Day 1 @ MIX06

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This morning Nathan commented that the Mix Beta 2 Refresh of IE7 has been released!

As I mentioned in a previous post... Microsoft has been doing great work continuing their support for standards with commitments to Web Standards in IE, WASP, the Open XML Submission to Ecma, XHTML Compliance in ASP.NET Whidbey and also Windows Communication Foundation.

Standards are of growing importance as Web developers and designers strive to make their sites work across all browsers and accessible by the broadest set of customers. Accomplishing this today using any platform and tool is difficult. Microsoft is committed to delivering standards-compliant tools and platform.

The IE7 team had three main goals with regards to CSS compliance in IE7.

  • Fix some really nasty bugs posted on sites like positioniseverything.net

  • Revise parts of our existing CSS implementation to be true to the spec

  • Add the most-requested new CSS functionality to IE

It is great to see that todays release of IE7 is going a long way to address existing CSS bugs.

Chris Wilson writes... "It’s a difficult challenge to keep compatibility with sites and apps but break compatibility for standards compliance, and we would appreciate you checking your sites and making necessary changes where you’ve hacked in non-standard stuff for IE in the past. We would particularly like detailed feedback on the work we’re doing in this area."

This new CSS compliance comes at a cost, we need you to test your sites in IE7 and provide feedback.

There is a preliminary whitepaper on Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 up on MSDN to help you with this process.

And just to show that the testing process is working earlier in the month I was contacted by TradeMe with a problem they discovered while testing their site in IE7.

It appears that the following javascript...
myListBox.options[newItemIndex] = new Option('My Text', 'My Value);
adds the element so that you can reference it but it doesn’t display it on the screen!

This test page doesn't work in the IE7 Beta 2 Preview but I am happy to report now works in the Mix Beta 2 Refresh of IE7.

Unfortunately we didn't get a public CTP of Expression Web Designer today and Wayne Smith confirmed that Expression Web Designer won't be making its public CTP debut at MIX. I'm really looking forward to the public CTP of Expression Web Designer.

Expression Web Designer promises to provide sophisticated CSS design features, such as innovative task panes, specialized tool bars and menus that provide precise control of page layout and formatting. EWD offers built-in support and validation for Web standards so Web designers can easily design to standards and optimize their sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility.

Highlights for today at MIX

Read the PressPass from Day 1, Visit VirtualMix and watch the keynotes.

The ATLAS site has been updated, the March CTP released with a "Go-Live" license and a global ATLAS contest was launched.

Also make sure you visit the new ASP .NET Developer Center

Tim Sneath profiles one of the first commercial WPF applications.

Tags: Mix06, Mix, IE7, CSS, Standards, WASP, ATLAS, AJAX

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006

    Open XML submission to ECMA is not a standard. It's fully paid for and Microsoft will get something for their money, a standard label for the single implementation available out there.


    Clearly, Microsoft has been redefining every single term that we take for granted such as "standard", "platform", "open API".

    This makes this blog a marketing blog.
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2006
    Hey Stephane,
    Thanks for the marketing credit... I haven't done any formal marketing training as I've worked as a software dev for 7+ years but such as any role marketing is important... see rod's post today... http://www.drury.net.nz/?blog=960.

    You are obviously passonate about this so please go and look at http://openxmldeveloper.org/LearnMore.aspx and provide your feedback here... Bill Gates said in his keynote this morning

    "So, it's really with the .NET announcement in the year 2000 that we made this commitment to put XML into all of our products, and we've gone through several steps in that evolution. First, we put converters on the outside of the products so we could just read and write XML formats. Then we had a stage where we had some understanding of XML inside the products, but it wasn't the native representation. And now, here with Office 2007, we actually have the logical file format in XML."

    "We've taken these document formats and we've submitted them to a standards organization. These will be very stable file formats, and yet they let you do these rich Office solutions in a much simpler way than ever before. So, you can take these documents, put them in a digital archive, and have access to these things in a very simple way. "

    FWIW - I didn't actually claim that the Open XML submission to ECMA was a standard.