This may be one of the very few times that I will ever praise Microsoft for their work in the web browser industry. And quite honestly I am only praising them out of the fact that they are finally fixing one of Internet Explorer’s most abused bugs (i.e. It would have been truly better if they didn’t have the bug in the first place).

I am talking about the Star-HTML hack (I apologize for not having a better reference article) in Internet Explorer. Which is where you can add a ‘*’ in front of your CSS selector inside of a style tag and it will only be applied in Internet Explorer.

<style type="text/css">
  /* Will only be rendered in IE */
  * html {
    border: none;
    height: 100%;
    margin: 0px;
    padding: 0px;
    width: 100%;
  }
</style>

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 has corrected this issue so that it ignores the syntactically bad code just like most other browsers. Which I would say is a good thing. However there is a bit of an uproar brewing about it being removed because so many developers have come to rely on it to get their webpages to look right in both IE and Non-IE browsers.

Personally I welcome the fix and think that people who have relied on a hack composed of syntaxtically incorrect code should not be surprised that it has finally caught up with them. Even Microsoft gets around to fixing its bugs from time to time. Personally, I don’t understand why anyone writes syntactically bad code to target IE when you can use conditional comments (which have been around since IE 5) to add specialized styles, extra Javascript, ActiveX components, etc.

However in all fairness Internet Explorer 6 was released almost two years ago (August 6, 2004), which is a tremendous amount of time when it comes to the web (which is part of the reason why IE is so insecure and has such standards compliance problems; it is very outdated in comparison to other browsers). So I can understand that many developers have come to rely on certain things to be a constant and may have many pages to fix.

Internet Explorer 7 also boasts what seems to be a decent jump up in standards compliance. It is hard for me to say specifically what has improved; I have just noticed that when I layout pages, IE 7 beta 2 renders them a lot closer to Firefox, Opera and Konqueror without custom styles.

Another thing that I am glad that Microsoft is finally fixing in their browser is the support for PNG (Portable Network Graphic) transparency. However I am by no means applauding them on this effort because many other browser have had full support for quite some time and the format has been standardized since October 1996. I am just glad that once the browser is released and in time I will finally be able to leave behind GIF’s (a graphic format from the late 1980’s) and stop doing DOM based workarounds.

This is a poll that is going on about the Star-HTML hack. If you understand the concept I encourage you to vote (if you have not already).
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/poll/star-html.php