Internet Explorer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:52, 6 January 2005

Revision as of 17:01, 6 January 2005

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[[Image:Box-model-bug.png|right|frame|The Internet Explore box model bug]]

Internet Explorer's rendering engine fails to completely implement the [[web standard]]s as defined by the [[World Wide Web Consortium]] (W3C). Although with each version Microsoft has improved standards support, including the introduction of a "standards-compliant mode" in version 6, the core standards that are used to build web pages ([[HTML]] and [[Cascading Style Sheets|CSS]]) are still implemented in an incomplete fashion. For example, there is no support for the <nowiki><abbr></nowiki> tag which is part of the HTML 4.01 standard, and there are bugs in the implementation of float-margins for the CSS1 standard. [http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5088642.html] [http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html] The [[Internet Explorer box model bug|buggy implementation of W3C box model]] is also one of the best-known bugs in Internet Explorer's implementation of CSS.

The [[Internet Explorer box model bug|buggy implementation of W3C box model]] is also one of the best-known bugs in Internet Explorer's implementation of CSS. Thanks to thisthese bugbugs, many developers have been using workarounds and [[Hack (technology slang)|hack]]s that utilize other bugs in the rendering engine, so as to hide and override CSS property settings from Internet Explorer. The CSS hacks are often very complicated, as they need to due with different versions IE under different platforms (mostly Windows and Mac). Some of the more common CSS hacks:

* Exploiting [http://www.info.com.ph/~etan/w3pantheon/style/starhtmlbug.html|Star HTML selector bug]

* Exploiting [http://rooster.stanford.edu/~ben/notes/authoring/cssie.php CSS parsing bug]

* Using CSS2 selectors that IE doesn't recognize

Pages that are designed to be compliant with W3C standards may not render correctly in Internet Explorer, and can crash the browser in the worst case [http://lists.virus.org/bugtraq-0310/msg00041.html]. However Internet Explorer's dominance of the web-browser market for the last 5 years has lead many web developers to treat it as a [[de facto standard]] and design their websites for IE's characteristic rendering, rather than [[computer programming|coding]] them to conform to the W3C standards. This leads to problems for users who use other web browsers.