Could this be true? Me writing about MS making some kind of progress, well yes actually, your eyes are not decieving you. Today I have been doing battle with the age old issue of getting valid CSS to behave the way the standards say it should behave in IE 6. This is an issue that has always driven me stark raving mad, to the point of shouting at the screen simply because I know I am right with respect to the CSS and its MS’s fault that it isn’t showing properly, worse, I know that if I don’t employ hacks to make it show correctly a whole load of my IE using customers will think my sites are non-functional.

In sheer desparation today I decided to install IE 7 beta 3 and see if there was some hope that the issues that frustrate me every day as a web designer would one day come to an end. Amazingly the first thing I tried (the site I had been trying to iron out issues with) rendered correctly. This has to be at least some progress as it gave me a little bit of hope and started to bring me out of the pit of dispair. I started noticing other things too, mainly valid code showing as expected.

There are still many old issues remaining; things like gaps where there should not and automatic indents and suchlike not specified in the style, but it is making progress, at least progress when bench-marked against older versions of IE. I will never be an everyday Windows user, but I like to think that looking into the future there is possibly a glimmer of hope that one day the code I write that validates at W3C will be displayed on IE in Windows the way I see it in Firefox and Opera for Linux.