Slightly ajar

I've been silent on the whole Opera complaint (note: not a lawsuit, so please stop calling it that) against Microsoft so far. I was as surprised as everyone when it happened. However, I want to take a quick break from the silence to congratulate the IE team on the fantastic work they've done on passing the ACID 2 test. This must have taken a lot of work and Microsoft have some very talented people in Chris Wilson, Markus Mielke and the rest of the team. My main question is if this is regular standards mode, or a special IE flag that puts IE8 into a stricter standards mode?

Does this mean the end of Opera's complaint about Microsoft's commitment to standards? I'd hazard a guess at no, as ACID2 isn't a full test of standards, and it is only one step on the way. There are many things that are important that it doesn't test, and doesn't even touch on DOM, JavaScript, SVG, CSS3 and the like. It is certainly a huge step in the right direction however. I personally hope they are fixing issues in their regular standards mode, as even if it breaks sites in IE (and I more than anyone would understand why that is bad, and how hard it is to get sites to fix issues), leaving the bugs as they are means many sites, built by people that don't care about standards, design for the broken IE behaviour and break in Opera (and other standards based browsers) without any way for us to fix the sites ,except for to beg and prey to the sites for them to fix it. This is obviously even harder for us to convince them than MS as we have less market share. Korea is a perfect example of a country that almost solely designs for IE bugs and Active-X.

Speaking of Active-X, it would make my day even more if IE8 drops support for this technology. That is a perfect example of why the browser wars that some designers are calling for is a bad thing. That would truly be something to smile about . With all Microsoft's know how in building Silverlight, I'm also looking forward to see if there will be announcement about SVG support. more transparency is always a good thing.

Lets raise our glasses to the IE team, and hope they continue on this promise. I'm looking forward to the next ACID test

Any webmaster or web developer that has tried to work with web standards will tell you of the countless hours they've spent trying to work around Internet Explorer bugs, banging their head against the desk, while it just works with the minimum of tweaks in other browsers. I've personally written pages where it's taken longer to work around these bugs than it did to write the original page in the first place. Well Microsoft's own developers feel our pain. Check out the source of this CSS file on Microsoft's servers: GeneralStyles.css.

/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack 
{
margin-right: 1px; 
}

* html .StupidIEWidthHack
{
width: 100%;
}

Lets all hope IE7 fixes these issues so we all don't need stupid IE hacks.