Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

The development team working on Internet Explorer 7 have been doing a great job. They have — quite correctly — focused on improving the browser’s CSS support and, as the beta preview shows, IE7 will be a huge improvement on IE6.

Internet Explorer’s JavaScript and DOM support is pretty darn good and IE7 introduces a few updates (like native support for XMLHttpRequest instead of using ActiveX). Still, there’s always room for improvement: that’s true of any browser. Here at the DOM Scripting Task Force, we’re hoping that some JavaScript nips and tucks might be on the cards for future versions of Internet Explorer.

We want to make the browser developers’ lives easier. To that end, Task Force member Peter-Paul Koch has kick-started a discussion called “IE 7 and JavaScript: what needs to be fixed?”

If you have some issues with IE’s JavaScript support that you’d like to see addressed, write up a description of the problem and post a link to it in a comment on PPK’s blog entry (links are easy to pass around).

As well as being a potentially useful resource for the browser makers, amassing a list of IE “gotchas” will be very beneficial for developers.

Your Replies

#1 On May 18th, 2006 12:44 pm Lars Gunther replied:

PPK’s site seems to be down. A look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28DOM%29 might give some useful ideas. personally I find the faulty behaviour with getAttribute() and setAttribute() to be very annoying. Adding support for getComputedStyle() would also come high on my wish-list.

#2 On May 25th, 2006 9:31 am TarquinWJ replied:

“Internet Explorer’s JavaScript and DOM support is pretty darn good and IE7 introduces a few updates”

Sorry, but I have to disagree. IE supports one feature from DOM 1, fragments from a few others in DOM 1 and 2, and incompatible versions of others (such as its own version of DOM 2 stylesheets and DOM 2 events). It still has several problems even with the parts that it does support.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/jsexamples/hasFeature.html

That is certainly not “pretty darn good”. It’s an embarassment. Its level of DOM support is absolutely pitiful compared with other browsers. Opera, Gecko, KHTML leave it to eat their dust. iCab, the little browser written by just two developers (one for the JS engine, and one for everything else), supports far far more. Even ICE supports more. The one or two updates in IE 7 are all-but nonexistent, barely worthy of mention.

That’s why PPK’s article is needed. Not because IE’s DOM support is pretty good, but because for such a widely used browser, it is pathetic, and in desperate need of an update. The hope is that MS will live up to their promise, and deliver something better for IE 8.

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