In my previous life I was a developer.  I did a lot of work on web applications which meant I had the joy of working frequently with CSS and spent many wasted hours getting the appearance of applications just right in multiple browsers on different platforms.

IE has been heavily criticised in the past for not being compliant with web standards and there are many documented rendering bugs when it comes to CSS.  Other browsers are not immune and they also have their own problems.

Today I read a post on the IE blog which was specifically on which bugs have been fixed in IE7 and also a bit of talk about future plans to become compliant.  Here are the bugs they fixed:

  • All bugs on positioniseverything.net except the “escaping floats” bug (which is planned for the future)
    • Peekaboo Bug
    • Internet Explorer and Expanding Box Problem
    • Quirky Percentages
    • Line-height bug
    • Border Chaos
    • Disappearing List-Background bug
    • Guillotine Bug
    • Unscrollable Content bug
    • Duplicate Characters Bug
    • IE and Italics
    • Doubled Float-Margin bug
    • Duplicate Indent bug
    • Three pixel text jog
    • Creeping Text bug
    • Missing First letter bug
    • Phantom box bug
    • Overflow now works correctly! (That means boxes do not automatically grow any more.)
    • Parser bugs: * html, _property and /**/ comment bug 
    • Select control: CSS style-able and not always on top
    • Auto-sizing of absolute positioned element with width:auto and right & left (great for 3 column layouts)
    • Addressed many relative positioning issues
    • Addressed many absolute positioned issues
    • % calculations for height/width for abs positioned elements http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=191182
    • <?xml> prolog no longer causes quirks mode
    • HTML element truly independent of the Body (now gets its own width, height etc.)
    • 1 px dotted borders no longer render as dashed
    • Bottom margin bug on hover does not collapse margins
    • Several negative margin issues fixed
    • Recalc issues including relative positioning and/or negative margins are fixed now
    • CLSID attribute of <object> tag no longer limited to 128 characters
    • :first-letter whitespace bug described in http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/02/460115.aspx fixed
    • Descendant selector now works properly for grand children when combined with other selectors
    • First-line and first-letter now applies when there is no space between word :first-line and opening brace {
    • Pseudo-classes now are working as expected if selector is excluded
    • The :link selector works now for anchor tag with href set to bookmark
    • Addressed !important issues
    • PositionIsEverything piefecta-rigid.htm now works
    • List-item whitespace bug fixed
    • Fixed Absolutely Buggy II
    • Absolute positioned elements now use always correct containing block for positioning and size information
    • Nested block elements now respect all overflow declarations (hidden, scroll, etc)
    • Fixed the opposing offset problem (absolute positioned element whit all four top, bottom left and right are present)
    • <a> tags nested within LI elements will no longer add extra bottom margin when hover occurs
    • We no longer lose the image aspect ratio on refresh
    • Cleaned up our ident parsing according to CSS2.1 rules
    • Fixed parsing bugs for multi- class selectors and class selectors that are combined with id selectors
    • And many more

Check out the post for more information: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/22/712830.aspx