Late last week, Internet Explorer lead program manager Chris Wilson posted to his blog a list of fixes, many of them CSS-related, that Microsoft is planning for IE 7.0.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is a scripting language that allows web developers to manipulate the way web pages are displayed in a browser. CSS can be used to change fonts, colors, web page element’s position, etc. The most recently approved CSS standard is CSS 2.0.

Microsoft failed to support the Worldwide Web Consortium’s CSS standards (beyond version 1.0, with which Microsoft did comply, according to company officials). Because of that web developers have been forced to work hard on tweaking and optimizing style sheets so web pages would display correctly in both IE and Mozilla based browsers.

Microsoft surprised many with Wilson’s post and a commitment to comply with CSS2

“In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can, and we will add the critical most-requested features from the standards as well,” Wilson blogged.

Brighter future for web developers?

Brighter future for web developers? Maybe, but not yet. Even after IE7 is released it will take a few years for the majority of IE users to upgrade to newer versions of Internet Explorer supporting CSS2 standards so we will have to keep tweaking our style sheets until it is save to move on.

Release of IE7 seems like a good start of a better future for web developers and designers but I don’t want to jump into conclusions yet. Rather let’s wait for the release of this new version of Internet Explorer to see how much is Microsoft committed to support the Worldwide Web Consortium’s CSS standards (The release date has not been set yet).

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.