IE CSS Support

SitePoint Blogs » In All Fairness … Internet Explorer Still Stinks

After lengthy discussion with the authors, we decided to treat inherit as a separate unsupported feature, and to list properties that would work perfectly in IE if not for inherit as fully supported. The vote was certainly not unanimous, but I felt like we were doing the right thing by IE—giving the work that Microsoft did in IE7 a chance to shine.

Except … it didn’t

In ignoring inherit when rating property support, our intention was to enable the many newly-supported CSS features in IE7 to show up in our compatibility tables.

After all, IE7 now supports position: fixed across all elements, completing (except for inherit, of course) support for that property. And IE7 introduced plenty of other new features, such as support for the child selector (>). It would be nice for our compatibility tables to reflect this, we thought—naively, as it turns out.

Once the authors had compiled all this compatibility information, what we discovered was that arguing about the difference between ‘partial’ and ‘full’ support in IE had been an academic exercise … because the vast majority of CSS features are too buggy in IE to rate either!

The position property does support fixed in IE7, but setting this property to anything but static causes that browser to mess up the stacking of overlapping elements by incorrectly establishing a new ’stacking context’, so we are forced to rate this property as ‘buggy’.

And Microsoft did implement the child selector as a brand new feature in IE7, but even in this golden age of standards, this new feature came with obvious parsing bugs (e.g. A > /* comment */ B will fail to work).

After racking my brains for a CSS feature that would have newly achieved ‘full’ support in IE7 without being afflicted by bugs, I happened upon the dimension properties. width and height had serious bugs fixed in IE7, and IE7 added support for min-height, max-height, min-width, and max-width. And as of the current draft of our CSS reference, these properties are listed with ‘full’ support in IE7! Hooray!

Sadly, a little research has revealed reports of a bug in IE7 that affects all of these properties. We have yet to confirm this bug, but if it’s the kind of thing that will impact real-world use of these properties, they’ll lose their ‘full’ rating as well.

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