Partly because the beta was carefully rolled out over many months, the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 has largely been a non-event, for developers as well as journalists. While not at the level of Mozilla Firefox, IE7 is far more standards-compliant than IE6, which was way more compliant than IE5.5, which beat the pants off IE5. To make IE6 render standards-compliant pages correctly, web designers came up with a Wikipedia’s worth of hacks. In IE7, those hacks aren’t necessary; some actually cause problems.
(Here’s a tip from Dan Cederholm, who created the CSS for Happy Cog‘s redesign of Advertising Age: “inline-block is the new-and-improved method for auto-clearing floats.” Use it to replace display: inline-table;.)
IE7 is also the first Microsoft browser to permit user scaling. It does this the same way the Opera browser does it (which is the same way Microsoft Office does it): if text is too small, the user scales the entire page. By contrast, Safari and Firefox use Text Zoom, originally developed by Tantek Çelik for IE5/Mac. In those browsers, if text is too small, the user scales the text size—and nothing but the text size. Images, column widths, and so on, typically do not scale (unless the web designer is doing something really tricky).
There’s a huge difference between Text Zoom and Page Zoom, and it will affect the way designers spec type sizes for the web. It didn’t matter much when only Opera scaled the page. It was a neat feature of Opera; but Opera’s neat feature didn’t affect the way standards- and accessibility-oriented designers approached text size. But market share matters. Once IE7 gains critical mass, a lot of our current thinking about ems and pixels and such will go out the window. I’ll write about that soon, probably on A List Apart.
Meantime, developers are focused on the persnickety stuff: Ajax and JavaScript compatibility problems, CSS bugs that didn’t quite get fixed, and CSS hacks that no longer work.
Like me, you may have heard from a client whose site you designed before IE7 existed. What problems have you encountered? What hacks have you jettisoned, and with what have you replaced them? (Please include URLs.)
[tags]css, IE7, bugs, hacks, workarounds, design, webdesign, tantek, dancederholm[/tags]
