What would you most like IE to support?

[me']

Lets face it. IE doesn't support half the things we want it to. It occurred to me earlier that some of the lack of features that I find annoying other people might take in their stride (it also occurred to me that I could make a pathetic little poll thread out of it too, but I won't mention that;)).

For me, I'd have to say that liquid layouts are taking a beating for the sole reason that min- and max-width aren't supported, so that would have to take number one spot. Second is background-attachment: fixed.

[brothercake]

My top three would be HTML, CSS and Javascript

[cg9com]

It's own death wish?

please?

[Skyzyx]

I'd say (in no particular order)


Support for PNG Alpha Transparency
No problems with the XML prologue
Support for application/xhtml+xml (or whatever it is exactly)
Fix the scrolling bug that is now fixed by using position:relative;
Support position:fixed;
Support background-attachment:fixed; on any element, including the body.
Support for :focus and :hover on more than just links.
Drop support for document.all and element.value (instead of document.getElementById("element").value) so that lame-o wanna-be web designers will be forced to use the DOM correctly.


I'm sure I'll add more later, but this should get me started.

[me']

Originally posted by Skyzyx
No problems with the XML prologue
Support for application/xhtml+xml (or whatever it is exactly) I'd agree there. Coding in pure XML would be great, and would leave us in a great position for the next change to XHTML. I'd also say support for the <?xml-stylesheet ?> element, but that's pretty poorly supported in other browsers too, so I can't complain there.

[Roy Sinclair]

One word: Standards.

Personally, I could care less what brand name the browser has as long as it renders standard html, xhtml, xml and CSS properly.

IE doesn't fllow the standards properly. Actually none of the browsers are perfect yet but IE is way down the scale right now and looks to have no hope of being improved for several more years!

[IdleWild]

Brothercake mentioned CSS.

I'd like IE to support CSS consistently, regardless of the level of support and whether it conforms to standards or not.

If we have to deal with non-standard support then can we at least agree a standard level of such failure?

Is that so much to ask:rolleyes:

[Paul Jr]

I wouldn't change anything. Sure, IE sucks, but if it didn't, then that would take all the fun out of web design! :D

[ionsurge]

@Paul Jr: We have netscape 4.0 for that.

:D

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by ionsurge
@Paul Jr: We have netscape 4.0 for that.
:D
LOL! :p

[liorean]

No specific order:
Correct(-er) SGML handling for HTML, including DOM change which makes tree traversal possible for badly formed markup - A traversal method change that means that THE SAME NODE MAY NOT BE A CHILD OF SEVERAL PARENTS.
Correct MIME-type handling - the HTTP headers rule supreme, content type detection ONLY AS A LAST RESORT.
Correction of all proprietary HTML, CSS and XML extensions to use either a separate namespace in the case of XML, an "-ms-" prefix for CSS, and a method that makes other browsers treat extensions as comments in HTML.
Full namespace support, namespace recognition for XHTML and XHTML2
Correction of the XSLT mechanism, so that the correct MIME type is accepted.
A general acceptance of "+xml" MIME types whether it recognises them or not, giving them to the xml parser unless there's a program installed that handles the content type, in whgich case it should give it to that program instead.
Support for XHTML and DTD MIME types.
Full native support for PNG, MNG, JPEG2000, SVG graphics formats.
CSS3 to as high level as possible, CSS2.1 in other cases.
Standards before eye candy, basic support before special features.
Removing bugs/standards breakage before adding additional support.
More user orientation, less programmer orientation, less featuritis.
Strict security, high privacy, low level of integration taking place without asking the user. Make sure the user know what the answer he's giving really means. Security and privacy before comfortability, within resonability.
Security, privacy and rights of the users before rights of the content provider and copyrights holders.
A browser for the sake of being a good browser, not for the sake of leveraging a hold for the other products to use.
After all that, add support for other standards technologies such as XInclude, XForms, XHTML2, XSL-FO, RDF, XLink, XFrames (, STTS, BECSS)

[brothercake]

Pain is not fun; wrestling with archaic technology is no day in the park. It's like saying, if it weren't for the grief and hardship our lives would be boring. Of course they wouldn't - they'd be infinitely more enjoyable and fulfilling.

I just don't get it with MS. How can one company be so cool and so innovative in so many ways, and yet so dark and cynical in others. Makes no sense.

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by brothercake
I just don't get it with MS. How can one company be so cool and so innovative in so many ways, and yet so dark and cynical in others. Makes no sense.
No one believes me when I tell them that M$ is an evil organization bent on taking over the world via distribution of bad products like IE and FP. ;)

[brothercake]

That's because it isn't true :p

Look at Microsoft Active Accessibility - no other OS comes close to providing the level of accessibility that Windows provides. MacOS is (almost) completely unuseable to people who are blind, while Linux, although eminently useable, is nonetheless far from having the kind of APIs that Windows offers.

For local and intranet-based application development, IE is superbly useful for its ability to integrate directly with other Windows applications. ActiveX gives the power of COM to any moderately-competent JS programmer. Sure that's by design, and a good example of what you might call "application nepotism" - Windows feeds of the value of IE-integration, and visa-versa; but nonetheless it is as it is, and what it is is very useful.

But at the same time ... they refuse to update their rendering engine to make accessible semantic coding .. er.. possible.

And they fail to tighten the pathways into COM sufficiently that they're not an outrageous security risk to anyone who uses a Windows machine (even if they don't use IE).

It all smacks of improperly joined-up corporate governance to me - the left hand doesn't care what the right hand is doing.