Internet Explorer is not CSS compliant

ISOSPEED rixs0: [IE isn’t fully CSS-compliant] dude. IE is more css compliant than firefox and Mac OS

Is IE more CSS compliant than Firefox or Mac OS?

First of all, Mac OS is not a browser. My friend here might be referring to Safari, Apple’s web browser based on KHTML, the open-source Web rendering engine for Unix.

I wanted to see if I’m alone in thinking that IE doesn’t play well with CSS standards. And here’s what I came up with — various quotes from around the web. You can easily verify these statements for yourself. Let me assure you: IE is not up to par with Firefox.

This is a good quote from a website that explains a few of the many problems that IE has with rendering proper CSS.

All browsers have CSS bugs, and IE leads the pack in this area, but that is not the end of the story. Microsoft has seen fit to engineer their browser to deliberately violate the standards in several critical ways. It might just be a mis-guided attempt to “make it simple” for newbie coders, or it might be a cynical ploy to crush the competition, but in any case it creates huge headaches for those of us who desire to employ CSS positioning on our pages.

positioniseverything.net/ie-primer

IE is not fully CSS compliant therefore this makes a perfectly good case study for CSS regardless of whether it works in IE. I won’t go into reasons why you should be using Firefox because if your visiting sites like this and still don’t know its because your not listening and I can’t change that.

9rules.com/whitespace/windows_xp_css_desktop

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

longhornblogs.com/robert/archive/2005/08/02/14342

I can see why IE would have trouble with that, since CSS is able to simulate that kind of behavior (overlapping frames), but IE isn’t fully CSS compliant. Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem. And the fact that Microsoft hasn’t put any effort into product advancement since Windows 2000. Everything since then is a minor revision, or just a major headache.

anandtech.com/talkarticle.aspx?frmResourceID=24324

So IE7 won’t be completely Standards Compliant… at least it will be a lot better than IE6, and lets just hope IE7.5 will be hot on IE7’s heels.

blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242

How about a proper CSS 2 implementation, with particular attention being paid to getting layout to render fully compliant pages correctly (hint, your arithmetic doesn’t seem to comply with the specs). position:fixed is essential, not an option. And how about fully compliant ECMAScript support. Get rid of all your non-standard extensions (OK, so you can follow mozilla.org’s example and use an undetected document.all if you must).

blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/03/09/391362

There is more info at the Web Standards Project.

For those wondering, CSS standards are defined here.

And this is for if you ever doubt that CSS is awesome.