Anyone got IE 7?

[robinturner]

Looking around sites on web design, I notice that many of their authors, who are far more fanatical than I am about web standards, are giving cautious approval to the beta of Internet Explorer 7. It's not quite a thumbs up, more of a pat on the back for going in the right direction, but it does seem that IE7 may get to where other browsers were a few years back. It might just be the case that Microsoft have avoided the fate of Netscape, who waited several years between NS4 and NS6, then sealed their fate by producing one of the worst browsers ever. (Of coure this painful process gave rise to Mozilla and then to Firefox, but that's another story.)

So I'm curious. Has anyone here tried IE7? Is it that much more standards-compliant than IE6? Does it have a chance of competing with Firefox? Can it display my home page correctly? Can I stop putting ugly hacks into my other websites to make them display properly in Internet Eplorer?

Comments

[giantlaser.livejournal.com]

Konqueror under Linux (Kubuntu, running KDE 3.5.2) also displays the little boxes. FireFox under Linux (same distro) does not.

The problem is of course your use of   to add extra whitespace after a period (full stop). HTML rendering engines already add space after periods correctly. Doing this yourself is actually non-compliant. The practice of double-spacing after periods is a throwback to typewriters and fixed-width typing systems. Of course, that doesn't stop me from doing it myself (see the source of this comment), but HTML helpfully sanitizes them for me.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I’ve had a few weird experiences with Konqueror’s rendering in the past—in most ways it’s good and standards-compliant, but occasionally it acts like an IE emulator ;-)

As for rendering whitespace …
To be honest, this page was an experiment to see if I could improve this. I don’t agree that most browsers render the whitespace after punctuation properly, or rather I should say they don’t render it to my tastes. I like more space after punctuation than most browsers provide, though not as much as the traditional typists’ rule of double-spacing after a sentence would give. The thing that makes most browsers (apart from Gecko-based ones) choke is the hair-space, which I find useful for separating things like em-dashes.

You are right that putting in a load of special characters is not ideal, and kind of goes against the idea of semantic markup. I would prefer, for example, to put quoted text in <q> tags, but until browsers learn to distinguish between opening and closing quotation marks, I’m stuck with writing things like &ldquo;.