Disappointed with IE7

I'm disappointed with IE7. I had read so much blurb about IE7 was supposed to be sacrificing backwards compatibility in order to be more standards compliant. Compliant schmompliant!

I'm an avid fan of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) but, like many web developers, was disappointed by the number of CSS properties that IE6 did not support. Never mind, I thought, IE7 will support them, then we'll be fine. How wrong I was. So far, I haven't found a single CSS property that I was hoping IE7 would support that is actually supported. Maybe it now actually now does correctly the stuff it always supported, but incorrectly, but it doesn't seem to have added anything new ... at least, nothing that I was hoping for.

Two examples, fixed positioning and the IE disappearing text bug.

Fixed Positioning

The idea of fixed positioning is that it enables a page element to be displayed in the same position on the screen (or, more correctly, "viewport"). This gives a simple method, avoiding Javascript, of creating those "sliding menus" etc. that always stay in the same position on your screen even when you scroll up and down ... such as those found on the British Royal Family's web site, for example.

In CSS, to achieve this functionality, all you have to do is assign the style "position: fixed" and then assign the left (or right) and top (or bottom) properties. This works great in Firefox and Opera but doesn't work at all in IE6 and still doesn't work in IE7!! Why? Isn't this supposed to be Microsoft's standards compliant browser?

Disappearing Text Bug

This is a pretty well-known bug in IE where by text in an element close to a floating div, just disappears ... though you can see if if you select the area of the screen where the text should be, using your cursor. The simplest way to fix this bug is to assign the style position: relative to the offending elements. This bug is a great annoyance, particularly when you primarily check your code in a non-IE browser. Surely IE7 would fix such a serious bug, so serious that it actually causes page content to disappear?! Well, yet again, just the other day as I was checking a new web page in IE7, I noticed text vanishing before my very eyes, so, good ole position: relative to the rescue.

Let's hope IE8 does a better job ... I wonder how long we'll have to wait.

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