A solution to browser (in)compatibilities (?)
Note: throughout this post, “IE7″ does NOT refer to Internet Explorer – the next version of the well-known Microsoft browser, but to a solution designed to make earlier versions of IE more standard-compliant.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting attempt to make Internet Explorer behave the way it should as far as web standards go. The thing is, CSS is a really powerful technology, yet it is not used at its full potential due to the fact that IE has a really poor support for web standards compliant to W3C specs. Are you wondering how this thing works? Well, it’s written on the project’s overview page:
IE7 loads and parses all style sheets into a form that Explorer can understand. You can then use most CSS2/CSS3 selectors without having to resort to CSS hacks.
The lightweight script is a single-line inclusion in your HTML / XML document. No alteration of your original markup is necessary. Neither do you have to alter your CSS.
This could make many people’s lives a lot easier – and you can tell by just looking at the compatibility issues it fixes. Some more notes from the project’s page:
IE7 represents an amalgamation of disparate solutions to Explorer’s rendering problems. The solutions it provides can be summarised as follows:
- CSS2/3 Selectors
- Fixed Positioning
- Box-Model (including min/max-width/height)
- Generated Content (new)
- PNG Transparency
- Broken HTML Tags
The tenets for this development are (where possible):
- IE7 will not alter the document structure
- IE7 will not pollute the global (JavaScript) namespace
- IE7 will subvert proprietary Microsoft properties/methods to imitate W3C standards
And one additional consideration:
- IE7 will sacrifice performance in favour of standards.
It actually is as easy as it sounds. I really do suggest you give it a try! All in all, my site is “IE7-Enhanced” starting today. 
