In Traction

For some time now, I have had a weird bug concerning an Ajax updater script in a Rails application. The updater worked with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer (IE).

Yesterday I finally figured out IE can only update div or span elements, when I came across this message on the Rails list. I was trying to update a table instead.

After wrapping the table in a div, and updating that div, everything worked.

Would be nice if this would have been documented in Prototype or the script.aculo.us scripts though.

Well, let me explain this provocing title. I tried to render my homepage with Internet Explorer 7, and the result is even worse than with Internet Explorer 6.

Here are some pictures to prove my point. First the correct rendering with Firefox:

Then Internet Explorer 6:

And finally, Internet Explorer 7:

Please note that my homepage is valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS.

It seems IE7 is nothing more than IE6 with some trivial fixes, such as alpha transparency for PNG images. Of course, supporting modern web standards would lead to Microsoft breaking its own websites. Furthermore it would break all HTML that depends on IE’s non-standard rendering, such as the HTML generated by FrontPage or ASP.NET.