Microsoft blog spills the beans on IE 7

Microsoft has finally told web developers what they've wanted to hear for years, promising support for graphics and style sheet standards.

In a blog entry posted on Friday, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team said the company plans to support key elements of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations Portable Network Graphics (PNG), an image format, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a web page styling standard.

In reference to support for the PNG standard, Chris Wilson, lead programme manager for the web platform in IE, said: "We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community. Our first and most important goal with our CSS support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely."

While Microsoft and critics of its web browser have focused most of their attention on IE's security liabilities, the issue of standards support remains crucial to web developers.

Glitches in IE's standards support mean that developers have to code separately for IE and for browsers that conform more closely to the standards. IE enjoys about 90 per cent browser market share despite losing some points to the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox browser.

Last month, Microsoft was reported to have been planning better PNG and CSS support, but Wilson's blog entry is the first public word to developers that the next version of IE - pegged as a security-focused release - will feature these improvements.

Opera Software's chief technology officer and co-author of CSS, Hakon Lie, said he was looking forward to the proof of IE 7's standards support in the new release.

"The blog says they have fixed a few bugs. Great, but we expect more than that," said Lie, "the big question is: will IE 7 pass the Acid2 test? I proposed the Acid2 challenge in a CNET article, and it has later been published by the Web Standards Project."

Other improvements said to be set for IE 7 - currently code-named Rincon - include tabbed browsing and support for IDN (Internationalised Domain Names).

For years, developers have complained about IE's CSS bugs and have called its rendering of certain PNG images "ugly".

Paul Festa writes for CNET News.com