IE8 Beta 1 – some additional notes and a bit of QA

Over the past couple of days, the IE Blog has become a hot bed of activity, with some readers complaining about recent “article floods”- at least it’s better than the drought we’ve had up until recently!

First off I have to congratulate IE – my personal opinion is that IE6 was pretty terrible and IE7 was a bit of a let down, but this time round they seem to have been keeping their ear to the ground in the web community and have now gone on to build a standards compliant (actually I’m not so sure about the ’standards-compliant’ part yet, as it’s only a Beta 1 and is currently pretty lacking) browser. There’s a history of many developers slating MS about not taking a proactive approach with regards to web standards; in fact, they’ve been taking an active role within many of the W3C WG’s (including chairing the HTML WG), and been working with WaSP along the way so kudos to them. As Dean Hachamovitch has commented in response to several posts, the IE team have submitted over 700 tests under a BSD license to the W3C “for possible inclusion in the official W3C test suite”.

Granted, they should have done all this with previous versions of IE but that’s another topic entirely…

First off before I inform you of some additional info IE have released; something that I came across when I was taking IE8 for an initial test ride which I found quite humorous, was that the Windows Marketplace site looks pretty badly broken in IE8 (notice the pic); either there are still major layout bugs in IE8, or that site was coded based on quirks in previous versions of IE – funny nevertheless.

Anyway, on to the new stuff – let me warn you first off, there is virtually nothing new that isn’t already in the CSS 2.1 Compliance whitepaper that I mentioned in another . However, details of pseudo-class support was something that the whitepaper left out, but they’ve now released some more information about those additions amongst other things:-

• Data URI
• Floats- it was always a given that what with all this standards compliancy talk, that the proprietary concept of Layout was going to be removed.
• Margin collapsing -previous of versions of IE had a fair few issues, but is now in line with the CSS 2.1 spec.
• :focus dynamic pseudo-class – in addition to the :before and :after pseudo elements (the page incorrectly describes these as pseudo-classes), :focus is now supported. It’s nice that this class has finally been given support, however I’d to see support for additional for more typographical pseudo-elements such as first-child, first-line and first-letter by the time IE8 becomes a public release candidate. EDIT: I’ve been doing some testing over at IE’s new test suite and found that it does support :first-child and :lang() – weird that IE haven’t mentioned this in their whitepaper?
• ‘overline’ text-decoration value - behaviour now conforms to CSS 2.1 spec.
• border-spacing
• z-index – IE8 now doesn’t treat the value auto as if it were 0 (zero); this was a bug in IE7.
• white-space – ‘pre-wrap’ and ‘pre-line’ values now supported.

Text Resizing

Currently (as of Beta 1) IE8 still doesn’t resize text that is sized using a pixel value, which is very frustrating – text resizing of fixed size values should certainly be implemented within the next couple of betas.