Sent by Eric A. Meyer on 1 February 2006 19:07
Hey all,
As I expected, the IE7 traffic is taking over. This is not
something that I think can be avoided, and it's hardly off-topic so
long as what we're talking about is CSS support in IE7 beta 2.
HOWEVER... let's please agree on a few ground rules before things
get too far out of hand.
1. Make absolutely certain you're testing IE7 beta 2. IE7b1, which
is available for download on various sites, had no known CSS
enhancements. It did not support CSS2.1 selectors, or fix any bugs
on which CSS hacks depend, or just about anything else. If you test
with IE7b1, you're wasting your time; and if you post results of
IE7b1 testing, you're wasting our time. Again, be SURE you're
testing with IE7b2.
2. If you're testing property, value, or behavioral support in IE7,
make absolutely certain that your test case uses no hacks, filters,
conditional comments, or other measures. If you're testing float
margin-doubling, for example, but you still have in a CSS hack
targeted at IE6, you might get completely spurious results.
3. If you're testing support for hacks, filters, or conditional
comments in IE7, try to make sure you're testing using simple effect.
For example, here's how I'd test for IE7 support of a child
combinator:
p {color: red; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;
text-transform: none;}
div>p {color: green;}
div > p {font-style: normal;}
#test>p {font-weight: bold;}
#test > p {text-transform: uppercase;}
<div id="test"><p>Bold uppercase green</p></div>
<p>Italic normal case red</p>
This approach uses property/value combinations that we all know
IE/Win has supported for a long, long time. If I tried to test with
widths and margins and padding, I'd be concerned that a box model bug
was sneaking in and making me think there was a selection bug. With
the color-font-text approach, this is far less likely. (Not
non-zero, but close.)
Similarly, to test arbitrary-element hover, I'd do nothing more
exciting than:
p:hover {color: green; background: cyan;}
4. If you find a new bug, as Al Sparber has with the a:hover/@import
problem (see http://www.projectseven.com/csslab/ie7/import.htm),
absolutely document it with a basic test case and feel free to ask
others for confirmation. But remember the previous points. These
will be invaluable for bug reporting to Microsoft.
5. Report any CSS bugs you find to Microsoft, whether they're
brand-new or long-standing old ones. (Heck, report ANY bugs you
find, but for the purposes of this list I'll stick to the CSS ones.)
Just because a long-known bug hasn't been fixed, that doesn't mean
there's no hope of it ever being fixed. It may be that a large
number of reports of a given bug will raise its priority enough to
get it fixed. Yes, this is true even of bugs we've known about for
half a decade. REPORT THEM ANYWAY.
And overall, using http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 as a
dumping ground for links to test cases is close to the best thing you
can do there, at least right now. This is true whether you have a
test case that shows an old bug is fixed, or an old bug still needs
to be fixed, or a new bug, or whatever. It would probably even be
useful to the IE team at Microsoft.
--
Eric A. Meyer [EMAIL-REMOVED])
Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting http://complexspiral.com/
"CSS: The Definitive Guide," "CSS2.0 Programmer's Reference,"
"Eric Meyer on CSS," and more http://meyerweb.com/eric/books/
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