samaxes

Alongside with the IE6/IE7 Application Compatibility VPC Images (VPC Hard Disk Image for testing websites on IE on Windows XP SP2), Microsoft now provides an IE8 version.

This is a great way to test your web applications since the IE8 Beta1 installation overwrites the previous IEs present in your system.

I’m really impressed about Microsoft responding to their customers and to the community.

Microsoft Expands Support for Web Standards
Company outlines new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8, will work with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behavior transition.

Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.
Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

That’s awesome. An unified industry can move forward.

You probably have already heard about Yousif Al Saif’s Multiple IE installer which makes possible to run Internet Explorer 6 in standalone mode. The problem is that Multiple IE doesn’t work on Microsoft Vista (still you can use an Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image).

Hopefully Yousif Al Saif is making progresses in getting Internet Explorer 6 run natively under Windows Vista.

More news to come…

With the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7), web developers once again need to test multiple versions of IE. Unlike other browsers like FireFox, IE is a system component for the Windows operating system. This makes running multiple versions side-by-side very difficult.

Thanks to Yousif Al Saif’s Multiple IE installer it’s possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions.

Today I stumbled on an article from 5ThirtyOne about an IE7 JavaScript library simply called IE7.

IE7 is a JavaScript library to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6

Impressive…

When you’re a web developer, you always keep running into annoying Internet Explorer bugs, so you need to hack your way around. Now with the IE7 out, a lot of the old CSS hacks don’t work anymore, and those that do still work, can’t be relied on to work in the future.

IE has a feature, called conditional comments, which could help us. As a hack it’s quite useful. IE 7 will support this too, and it even allows you to detect different versions of IE.

Here’s an example:

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
    <style type="text/css">
        @import "ie_hacks.css";
    </style>
<![endif]-->

[if lte IE 6] means “if less than or equal to IE 6″. Other possibilities are:

[if IE]

if Internet Explorer

[if gte IE 5]

if greater than or equal to IE 5

[if lte IE 5]

if less than or equal to IE 5

[if IE 6]

if Internet Explorer 6

[if IE 5.5]

will work too,

[if IE 7.0b]

as will this for IE 7 beta.