A major breakthrough for the web design & development communities…
Yesterday (March 5th), at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, the IE team announced the availability of a developer beta of IE8 Beta 1 for Download.
This normally would not be such a huge deal, but the folks at Microsoft are actually trying to implement standards compliance. What are we going to do with all of the extra free time generated by not having to kick our code in the pants until it renders correctly despite all of IE’s quirks?
Not only are they “attempting” standard compliance, as they have tried, and failed miserably in the past. They’re actually testing the fact this time!
We’ve contributed over 700 test cases to the W3C CSS working group because we think a comprehensive certification test suite for CSS is important for true interoperability and we support the W3C’s effort to deliver such a suite. The CSS spec is good, but contains many ambiguities, and a test suite will help resolve them and benefit web developers and designers.
Also, it sounds like IE8 is going to deliver full standards-compliant CSS 2.1 support by default, instead of requiring specialized mark-up to kick it into action. This was a reversal in stance by the IE team, after a substantial outcry by the design/development community. I can only imagine the possibilities if they actually make a habit of listening to their customers…
Read much more about the IE8B1 release at the IEBlog.
