WSP RELEASES LIST OF INTERNET EXPLORER'S TOP 10 PROBLEMS WITH KEY
WEB STANDARD

With the launch of The Web Standards Project's "IE Top 10 CSS
Problems" <http://www.webstandards.org/ie/>, WSP today revealed
continuing flaws in Microsoft's support for the Cascading Style
Sheets standard, and challenged the company to improve its
browser's handling of the crucial standard.

Created in response to a challenge from Microsoft, the "IE Top 10
CSS Problems" was developed by WSP's "CSS Samurai," an ad hoc
committee of Cascading Style Sheets experts. The list vividly
demonstrates how far the Redmond company must go if it intends to
claim superior web standards support in its upcoming release of
the Internet Explorer 5.0 browser.

WSP's "CSS Samurai" group includes Invited Experts to the World
Wide Web Consortium and contributors to the CSS standard. This
W3C-created standard gives developers precise control over the
appearance of Web pages. However, the document at
<http://www.webstandards.org/ie/> reveals that many critical
features of CSS-1 remain either incorrectly implemented;
implemented for only an undocumented selection of eligible HTML
elements; or entirely neglected in Microsoft's browser.

"While we commend Microsoft for leading the way in implementing
Cascading Style Sheets, first in Internet Explorer 3.0,
unfortunately there've been significant parts of the standard
that have been neglected or incorrectly implemented in their
browser up to now," said George Olsen, WSP Project Leader and
Design Director/Web Architect at 2-Lane Media
<http://www.2lm.com> in Los Angeles.

"We realize the next version of Internet Explorer is still in
beta and hope that these problems will be fixed by the final
release so that Explorer will be 100 percent compliant with CSS-1
-- especially since Microsoft has been spending development time
adding non-standard extensions to CSS in their beta releases so
far," he said.

Last week, in response to a WSP lobbying campaign, Netscape said
its Navigator 5.0 will include software intended to make the
browser 100 percent compliant with CSS-1 and will also support
parts of the CSS-2 standard.

The current browser bugs and omissions in CSS-1 can render pages
impossible to read and make it nearly impossible for developers
to use CSS-1 without workarounds, said Todd Fahrner, leader of
WSP's "CSS Samurai" committee and Design Technologist for San
Francisco-based Studio Verso <http://www.verso.com>.

"Now that Netscape shows every sign of achieving 100 percent
CSS-1 conformance in its 5.0 browser, we challenge Microsoft to
keep pace in both its Windows and Macintosh offerings, to
evacuate rendering issues once and for all from the browser-war
battlefield," Fahrner said.

Many of the specific problems that Internet Explorer needs to
address involve  laying out elements of a Web page and handling
styles correctly.

[The bullet list used for more technical press, otherwise use
summary list.]

Areas that need to be addressed for Internet Explorer to fully
support CSS-1 include:

* Proper handling of CSS-1's Web page layout features, so that
Web developers no longer need to work around the problem by using
HTML tables or other inappropriate code for layout.

* Fixing problems that prevent CSS-1 typographic styles from
working properly within HTML tables -- a problem that's
particularly frustrating to Web developers because they've had to
use HTML tables as a workaround to the previously mentioned CSS-1
layout problems.

* Supporting the ability to switch stylesheets, which would
redefine the appearance of a Web page to fit the needs of
particular users (for example, those needing high-contrast colors
to help them read) or the needs of particular platforms (such as
changing a page so that it works better on a television- or
PDA-based browser).

Many of the specific problems that Internet Explorer needs to
address involve the problems laying out elements of a Web page
and handling styles correctly.

These examples are the first of a series of WSP
standards-compliance reviews to provide feedback on interim
releases of major browsers. WSP is also working with The Open
Group http://www.opengroup.org, which is developing a full test
suite for CSS-1, expected to be completed in a few months.

About The Web Standards Project: WSP is an international
coalition of Web developers and Web experts who are urging
browser makers to fully support Cascading Style Sheet Level 1
(CSS-1), the Document Object Model (DOM) and XML in their
browsers. Its effort to bring attention to the existing and
potential problems involved with browser incompatibility does not
mean that WSP is opposed to innovations by browser manufacturers.
The coalition merely urges browser manufacturers to use open
standards for enhancements and support existing ones before
adding new features.


George Olsen      mailto:golsen@2lm.com 
Design Director/Web Architect   
2-Lane Media           
http://www.2lm.com                     
tel: 310/473-3706 x2225