IE7 būs labāks CSS2 atbalsts?

Šeit var palasīt Richard MacManus interviju ar Chris Wilson, IE7 projekta vadītāju. Intervija ir pagara un lielā mērā ūdens liešana (no MS pārstāvja puses), tāpēc ievietošu tikai dažus key citātus un savas piezīmes par tiem.

Richard: Where is IE7 at in terms of CSS compliance - and where it is heading?
Chris: (..)In fact really our platform, other than doing security work and some supporting work for user experience (things like improving our printing support and implementing the zoom feature), we really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements. That was really the largest focus of our platform work overall. (..) One of the things I said in my post is that I think it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have an analysis of exactly where we are as a number with supporting or complying with CSS - given that there isn't an official test suite that exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not. (..)

Kā redzams, Microsoft apgalvo, ka strādājuši galvenokārt, lai uzlabotu CSS un standartu atbalstu. Bija arī pēdējais laiks, jo lietotāji jau sāk pamanīt IE sērijas pārlūku nepilnības un meklēt alternatīvas. Tai pat laikā viņi negrib atzīt Acid2 testu, kas, lai arī neoficiāls, ir CSS standarta atbalsta tests de facto pārlūku izstrādātājiem. Starp citu, Opera, sākot ar 9. versiju, renderē testa "attēlu" pareizi, kurpretim pēdējā (1.5.06) Firefox versija - nē, kas savukārt nozīmē, ka vai nu Opera ir labāks CSS atbalsts, vai arī viņi ir koncentrējušies uz testa nolikšanu. Lai nu kā, joprojām palikšu pie Opera, galvenokārt lietošanas ērtības dēļ.

No kreisās uz labo un no augšas uz leju - Acid2 tests pārlūkos Opera 9, FF 1.5, IE7b3 un IE6. Lai arī nelieli uzlabojumi redzami, IE7 joprojām ir tālu no pilna CSS atbalsta.

Richard: You're now at IE7 Beta 3, so in terms of CSS compliance where is IE7 Beta 3… where would you put your progress at so far? About halfway where you want it to be, or three quarters of the way there?
Chris: Tough question, in terms of stating that we really do fully support the CSS 2.1 spec, it's hard to tell because there is a bias to any analysis. We're certainly somewhere between those two… I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though - and again, it really depends on how you end up weighing things. The problem is, if I gave any number I'd really want to support how I came up with that number - and I don't have a great way to do that today.

Skarbs jautājums. Atbilde kā vienmēr izvairīga. Kaut gan, tas nav nekas neparasts programmatūras izstrādes jomā.

Richard: One of the comments in the Slashdot thread said that backwards compatibility "is pretty important to Microsoft, which is why they are still using their older rendering engine instead of replacing it with something better. They can't make big changes because they are afraid they'll break things."

Is that basically the situation, that you can't create a new rendering engine because it'll break previous IE browser versions?
Chris: I don't actually think it's true that we can't create a new rendering engine. There are a couple of responses I'd make to that. One is that although it certainly has a set of bugs in it as well, there are a lot of things that our rendering engine does quite well. In fact does extremely well. One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure. (..) And it's possible that we'll replace it with a different engine even, at that level, although that's not replacing the entire dynamic HTML engine - it's replacing just a piece of it. The hard part is that the baseline for what you need to support for that rendering engine is actually quite large. (..)

Taisnība, protams, ka MS varētu radīt jaunu dzinēju, bet viņi nedrīkst atteikties no esošajiem lietotājiem (kas nozīmē lielāko pasaules daļu) un neiekļaut produktā atpakaļsavietojamību. Turklāt, IE dzinēju izmanto ne tikai pārlūkā, uz tā balstās liela daļa Windows GUI, kas arī jāņem vērā. In fact, viņi paši sev parakstījuši nāves spriedumu, renderējot "līkas" lapas - ar laiku atpakaļsavietojamības nodrošināšana paliks tikai problemātiskāka un dārgāka. Manuprāt, tas ir tikai laika jautājums, kad lielāko tirgus daļu ieņems šobrīd alternatīvie pārlūki.

Richard: To clarify then, you're saying that with IE7 you're hoping to support as many of the CSS Web standards as possible, while also having that backwards compatibility. That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?
Chris: Absolutely, in IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards. Even really at the expense of more backwards compatibility than we've ever done in the past. But backwards compatibility is still pretty critical for us, because of our user base. One of the things that we've been doing for some time now has been approaching a lot of the web development community and in particular site authors directly even, and saying: we found that there's a problem with your web site when you use IE7, and it's because of a standards improvement that we've done - here are the details of it. Also here's a set of tools that you can go and analyze your site with and figure out what sort of CSS hacks, and that sort of thing, you're using to work around IE6 problems from before. And then you'll know how to fix them to work with IE7 and its better standards compliance.

IE7 izstrādātāji apziņojot "līko" lapu autorus par savietojamības problēmām ar IE7. Lai arī apsveicami, visu web izstrādātāju informēšana ir nereāla. Turklāt, lapu izstrāde prasīs vēl lielākas pūles - būs jāpanāk savietojamība gan ar standartiem (izstrāde priekš Opera un Firefox), gan dažādi hack-i priekš IE6 un, iespējams, IE7. Ir naivi cerēt, ka visi esošie IE6 lietotāji īsā laikā pāries uz IE7.

Nobeigumā vēlos pieminēt, ka IE7b3 instalācija rada zināmas neērtības - tā kā tiek mainīta daļa sistēmas bibliotēku, būs nepieciešams restarts un neliela ņemšanās ar programmām, kas seko sistēmas stāvoklim (ugunsmūri, dažādas anti-spyware programmas u.c.). Turklāt, IE7 nebija savietojams ar vienu no sistēmā esošajiem add-on.

P.S. Rakstā tiek apspriesta IE7 savietojamība ar standartu atbalstu, tāpēc komentārus rakstiet par tēmu, nevis "IE sux, FF rulzz", "Opera rulzz, FF sux" u.tml. bez pamatojuma. Tolerance šādiem komentāriem un to autoriem netiks izrādīta.

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