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IE5 for Mac CSS1 compliant?

Posted on April 04, 2000

in Software

by Martin Burns (MartinB)

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Martin Burns

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User since: April 26, 1999

Last login: March 30, 2010

Articles written: 128

After some extensive testing, I can report that ie5 for Mac appears to be Microsoft's first CSS1 compliant browser. Using W3C's CSS Test Suite, the only property in the CSS standard not supported by ie5 is text decoration: blink, which is not only ugly as sin, but a non-mandatory property. ie5 for Mac even passed the CSS Acid Test, which previous standards compliant MS browsers failed. However, House of Style reports that there are still bugs in the support of the vertical-align text property and some of the inline elements. I also notice that as ie5 uses a highlight box for active links, rather than the ALINK colour, this could also be seen to be broken. Finally, as previously commented on evolt, MS have seen fit to break the 72dpi screen resolution standard on Macs, just as they have previously for all Windows applications. While it is resettable via user preferences, it is still a regrettable backward move portrayed as progress.

Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.

Amongst his favourite things is ZopeDrupal, which he uses to run his personal site. He's starting to (re)gain a sneaking regard for ECMAscript since the arrival of unobtrusive scripting.

He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.

Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?

Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?

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Submitted by isaac on April 5, 2000 - 21:16.

Aren't they just being "standards compliant" with the shift to 96dpi for their Web browser? Everyone was asking for compliance...

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Submitted by MartinB on April 6, 2000 - 03:49.

'Like Windows' is not standards compliant. The pre-existing standard was 72dpi. 96dpi conflicts with all the font sizes in every other Mac application. The only benefit is it's the same as when you use a browser on Windows. For users who aren't forced to use Windows browsers in another setting, there's absolutely no benefit to breaking their experience. Plus of course, some sites deliver appropriate stylesheets to platforms and make the switch for you, and this will confuse the hell out of them. Unless of course IE5 for Mac reports itself as IE for Windows in its UA string. Wouldn't surprise me - it was MS's solution for IE (still reports itself as a Mozilla browser), and would allow them to claim IE5/Mac users in their Windows user stats. The worrying thing is, despite all this, I'm now using IE5 as my main Mac browser, once I'd changed the font settings. Does anyone know if it supports client side VBScript?

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Submitted by isaac on April 6, 2000 - 22:44.

Both PC and Mac rely on stupid assumptions here - that their displays are running at 96 and 72 DPI respectively. AFAIK, neither asks the display subsystem how many DPI it is currently showing and renders accordingly. Incidentally, from what I've read, there are Matrox cards that allow the user to specify a DPI. Why not give users a choice in the browser too? So, by *default* IE5/Mac allows more people to view more sites as they were indended. Not "all", but "more". Sure, it might screw up people who serve Mac-specific stylesheets, but that'd hardly be a majority... IE5/Mac also allows you to specify whether you want to go by 96 or 72 DPI, so if you're bitter (obviously), and like your small Mac fonts, and mostly unreadable sites, then change away. To recap: they've implemented a "safety" default of 96 DPI so that more sites than ever are immediately readable on the Mac, and they're also allowing anyone to change the sizing, whether for reasons of personal preference, or to simply read a specific page.Yet, you've been complaining for months, and continue to do so. It's interesting to note that Netscape are also adopting 96 DPI as default. Here's a quote from Netscape's Mike Pinkerton: "We`re rendering at 96dpi instead of the old 72 to match the web "standard" which is win32. IE5Mac is doing this as well." And I believe that Mozilla on Unix has a default value of 96 DPI too.

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Submitted by joeclark on May 7, 2000 - 10:13.

The thing is that IE5 isn't quite HTML 4-compliant, either. IE5 leaves out significant features in HTML 4 (and earlier incarnations), including LONGDESC, SUMMARY in TABLE, CITE in BLOCKQUOTE, ABBR, and ACRONYM, to name several. There's still no support for LINK metadata, which even ol' Lynx supports. (iCab does a stunning job of supporting LINK metadata.) These sins are venial, not mortal, but let's call a spade a spade. IE5 has partial support for HTML 4. Love the CSS1 support. Wish MS and its boosters had done a bit more testing on HTML 4.

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IE5 insertAdjacentHtml bug

Submitted by rperes on August 15, 2001 - 11:43.

It seems to me that IE5 for mac is not fully compatible with insertadjacentHtml method since form elements created on the fly with this method can't be passed in a submit action with get neither post method. So insertadjacentHTML is almost "trash" in Macintosh computers.

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