IE8 beta1 ships, standardista rejoys
What an exciting times…
One theme I hope developers notice here is interoperability. The team understands how big an impact differences between browsers (and previous versions of IE in particular) have had on developers in terms of wasted time, frustration, and (in some cases) limiting the experience that they deliver to users. We want to deliver a big step forward in real-world interoperability for developers with IE8, and standards are at the core of our approach. This topic deserves a lot more than just this paragraph; expect more soon.
To read something like this on IE team blog page makes me warm in heart. With the previous announcement that IE8 will push the standards as hard as it can (and Microsoft certainly can) this is genuinely warming. The amount of cursing I do regarding IE7 is several orders of magnitude less than what I do with IE6. I genuinely believe IE8 will be a pleasure to test and develop. Yes, I’m hoping on the hype bandwagon, full speed. IE developer center is an active place as it was back in IE4 days, when Microsoft was in its best days.
There are three main points that trouble me with IE7, listed by annoying factor.
z-index positioning contexts: I will test and re-test my z-index tutorial in IE8 and update it accordingly. This is the single most infuriating quibble I have left with IE and the main reason I still have to use IE7.css under conditional comments.
Another issue I’m looking forward to check is does IE8 support :after and :before in line with other browsers, so at least float clearing will not be an issue anymore. min-height:0 does the job in IE7, abusing the content box expanding bug. Speaking of which…
Third issue is exactly that: if the content I have in particular box can’t fit in it, it should stick out and overlap the neighboring content; it should not expand the whole box thus destroying my lovely float-based layouts.
If these things are done properly…man, would I be a singing web developer then.