While most of the world seems preoccupied with the World Cup 2006 happenings and of course the ever-so-popular hollywood marriage of Tori Spelling, the web developers of the world are more worried about what Internet Explorer 7 is going to do with our works of art.
On my daily readings on web development around the internet, the release of IE7 beta 3 seems to be all the buzz. Of course, I had to follow and download it to test.
Looking back when I first caught wind of IE7, my initial reaction was excitement; thinking that we might actually have a standard platform to design and program to. For once, we as web developers won’t have to hack our way through a design’s implementation to make it work. Here at Effect Web Media we strive to make effective websites that work as well as look fantastic for Goshen, Indiana and surrounding areas such as South Bend, Mishawaka and Elkhart. Naturally, we have found our tricks to get around IE6’s shortcomings and still produce amazing and effective websites. Please visit our website www.effectwebmedia.com for more information on how to get your effective website today!
However, the closer the release, the more fire IE7 seems to be taking from our kind. I have read slight praises as well as a total tearing apart of IE7’s beta. Although I find myself torn as to which way to lean. Personally, from experience with downloading the beta and testing it out, it is a massive improvement over its preceding releases. It takes the simple things that once caused cringing with thoughts of implementing and pushing the browsers to the limit, such as PNG transparencies, descrepancies as how it handles floats and margins, and brought them up to date. To me, that is a huge relief to not have to make a completely seperate stylesheet for these things. Nevertheless, there will still be users out there with IE6 installed on their computers. Which means, we will still have to support that as a seperate browser.
In reality, if that was the only issue, it wouldn’t be a big deal to me, afterall that’s all I know how to do currently. But again with experience of my own, I have already come across a design that requires fixes for IE7 as well as IE6. So not only do I have to double my efforts (if only we all could have a Double Mint Twin), I now know that I am going to occasionally need that extra “umph!” to make it agreeable with 7 as well.
So in conclusion to my rant of IE7, I must say that there are a handfull of improvements made while giving kudos to Microsoft for actually realizing it’s time. I must look at the Internet Explorer 7 release as a positive thing because this means we are one step closer to making the web a better, more standard way of browsing. And to Microsoft, I will give you a “close but no cigar…yet” in hoping that these small inconsistancies will be corrected before the final release.
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