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Latest Update from Molly

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Hey everybody! Molly Holzschlag here. As some folks might be aware, I’ve been visiting Microsoft, refining our work goals in relation to standards, and meeting some really great people in the process. One thing that’s really got me excited is how many people from around the company reached out to me with great enthusiasm regarding product evolution in relation to Web standards and interoperability. This did come as a surprise, frankly, I was confident that the IE team is more than interested in doing the good work, but learning that other product teams around Microsoft are paying attention to your feedback and concerns and are beginning to reach out to form strategic plans makes me feel very optimistic. Rome wasn’t built in a day, of course, and there’s a lot of working to do over the coming days, weeks, years and decades. But one thing is very clear, people are interested, listening, and best of all, enthusiastic.

Here’s a synopsis of the conversations and issues we discussed, along with details as to how some of the challenges Microsoft is facing are being prioritized and addressed.

My visit began with a social get together with Pete LePage on Sunday. After enjoying a visit to downtown Seattle, we settled in over garlic fries at Gordon Biersch and began to brainstorm focus for the visit, and what we wanted to accomplish individually and together. Both of us felt strongly that we should each come up with a clear description of role, responsibilities and task priorities in detail. I spent Sunday evening sorting through the main points of our discussion and coming up with top goals.

Monday morning was spent fleshing out goals and deliverables with Pete. The afternoon found me clarifying four activity areas of my role, drawing out a general plan. Then, I mapped each activity area to delivery mechanisms and measurable results. These were reviewed by Brian Goldfarb and Pete, who provided guidance and editorial feedback.

Activity Areas and Related Actions:

Developer and designer community liaison. This focus area is a continuation of ensuring that the discussion between web developers and designers and Microsoft at large remain open. I will continue to attend and participate at events and conferences focusing on standards and interoperability concerns as they relate to all tools and browsers. A monthly resource roundup will be posted here on the IE Blog to ensure that strategic updates like this one, news of importance, articles, podcasts, screencasts and videocasts of interest to the community are published on a consistent and regular basis.

Vendor Interoperability Liaison. In this activity area I will work to achieve the following:

  • Acquire and develop solid relationships for browser and related software vendors and generalinteroperability solutions
  • Encourage more productive discussions - to quote Chris Wilson from the Browser Panel at the recent South by Southwest event, “The talking smack years are over”
  • Assist with standards and long-term strategy and planning for interoperasbility concerns as they relate to other vendors and Microsoft products and services

Strategic consulting for standards implementation in Microsoft Web-related products. Priority products at this time include:

  • IE
  • Visual Studio  / ASP.NET
  • Expression line of Web design and development tools
  • Additional products as I am able (Office, etc.)

Acquiring and producing educational content related to aspects of working with standards: Accessibility, Markup, CSS, JavaScript, DOM and ASP.NET resources will be acquired, produced and offered to the community at large for both ongoing and internal education.

Wshew, that was a big step. Now that Pete and I were able to get that formalized, the days continued into some interesting areas of actually doing some strategic planning. I met with Chris Wilson and members of his team to address developer concerns regarding feedback and bug reporting mechanisms. This is understood to be a priority concern for both developers and for Microsoft, who really do want to provide decent bug reporting so as to improve developer input on IE and other products, too.

A bit later I met with Saloni Mira Rai. Saloni is tasked (among other things) with solving problems in IE CSS support for printing. We discussed specification and implementation oddities as they currently relate to the way people use and write CSS. This was a highlight for me, as I’ve been studying how ambiguous language in specs influences browser differences. Another meeting, this time with Channel 9, gave Pete and I a lot of ideas and resources for where and how to publish and promote developer and designer resources.

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for IE, met me for an early morning coffee Wednesday at Café 9. Dean is always energized when I see him, supportive, honest and filled with questions and great ideas. I have some video clips of our discussion, which ran the gamut from standards to security to browsers to commenting on the gorgeous morning. I’ll be publishing those soon. Late morning saw a meeting with Andrew Jewsbury, Program Manager of Expression Web. We talked about the product’s current weaknesses and strengths, and discussed creating an advisory board of external experts to assist with the direction of Expression product growth.

Here’s an exciting bit for those developers and designers who’ve been clamoring for internal training. Well, it’s going to happen. I’m working with Markus Mielke and Cyra Richardson planning internal standards and best practices on-site training events across Microsoft.

Clearly, a lot of energy, time and money is being put behind the commitment to standards and interoperability within a variety of Microsoft products. Finally, there’s but one goal, and that’s to ensure that Microsoft’s commitment to standards and interoperability as well as all people who use and work with Microsoft products will continue as a priority goal for both the short and long-term evolution of the Web.

-Molly

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
    This will sound a bit far fetched for some that haven't worked intimately with IE, but I would like to see prototyping on the HTML Elements working in IE(next). For those of us in a controlled environment (e.g. we can ensure users have javascript turned on) Intranet, Internet service, etc. this would be a godsend. With the above, we could safely workaround missing/broken functionality at the DOM level, with minimum interference and browser specific custom code. and I for one, would no longer need to complain about anything the IE team does, because whats broken, I can fix. thankz

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
    This is quite a task! Is there really that much of a disconnect with standards that there requires on staff training of the subject? I've always trained my staff internally, but there's a level of understanding that you hone your skills on your own time as well. So much of what you're doing seems like 101 education on the subject of standards, semantics, etc - backend changes to the engines that run these products will be a while down the road I'd assume then. On a side note: has there been any feedback about merging Offices' rendering engine with IE 7? Regardless, all of this sounds positive to me, and it's an enjoyable surprise. Although I haven't seen as much change as I've been hearing (and we are always IE reluctant), it's a pleasure to know that these subjects are transparent to the community and moving forward.

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
    SVG support would be appreciated. But whatever standards you implement, please try your best to do them right the first time.

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2007
    Dont forget to add back the ability to customize toolbars, buttons and their layout ;)

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
    Wow, that post sounded like bureaucrat-in-a-blender. On a more serious note, all the work to get developers to "modernize" on a div+CSS layout won't help international sites that try to do things unsupported by CSS, like right-to-left layout.  Table-based layouts flip perfectly and automatically.  Div+CSS... doesn't.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
    I'm just curious if there is some sort of time table for MSIE's many CSS + printing issues. I've found that IE7 is particularly bad at properly handling the page-break-after/before style. About the only think you can guarantee is that it won't work correctly. For instance you might (by some mirical) actually get the page layed out correctly for default print margins, but if the end user changes the print margins (in my specific case to make them bigger) IE will all of the sudden decide to start ignoring the style. This particular bug is REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD!!!! Bad enough that I'm surprised IE shipped with the bug! Very frustrating because it's taking what has the potential to be a great web-browser and runing it.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
    In complete agreement that the IE engine should not be a basis for Outlook. The Word engine is ideally suited for an e-Mail client. The major argument supporting standards is the benefit across the board for all users and developers. The want of a browser engine for an e-Mail client simply to allow easier delivery of HTML branded content to accommodate a very small percentage of the product's customer base [web developers, et al] is hypocritical at best. Other and more efficient technologies are available for delivery of branded content. E-mail is text [ASCII] based communication. Would very much like to see an update to the HTML Help compiler, CHM, updated for standards and for security.  The 1.4 SDK was released in 2000, if not mistaken.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    @Coward SVG is an old technology

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    What would be really useful is if when maintaining backwards compatibility, Microsoft could use a custom processing instruction tag instead of DocType. Versions of Internet Explorer, ASP and other products do not necessarily coincide with versions of the standards.  An HTML 4.01 page may need to run in backwards compatibility mode, etc. In an XML document, Microsoft Internet Explorer looks for a ProgID Processing Instruction, and then uses that to open the document.  It would be incredibly useful for Microsoft to use this mechanism, and not the DocType, to switch on features such as Quirks.

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    "Fix the 'C' in 'CSS' to actually mean Cascade, so that nested links <a> do not need exclusive class/style declarations to work properly" For whatever purpose would you need nested links? That just sounds like poor HTML to me. [a href=""]One link [a href=""]and another link[/a][/a] What concept are you trying to imply? That link 2 is related to the other? It just doesn't make sense...

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2007
    html born with browsers. if we do not use such as css,dom,script etc, we also can do necessary works, inserting images,text,linking to another addresses, layouting contents, etc. I think these functions are enough for common bussiness situation. Why we now using css,script,dom??? yeah! apparently, facing some sophiscated business areas, web designers design a page not simply fill contents for HTML document, they need consider codes of structure & architecture of server pages more. they need easy maintainbility and extensibility. for example, css for HTML, is departing some functions such formatting, layouting from HTML, thus HTML can do what it shoud do. ie versions are changed so quickly, but it do not concerns the important&basic functions  should be fixed and implemented "first", on the contrary, it concerns not very useful new features more! conclusion: list the most important & basic functions still bugged in IE which should be fixed and implemented in time. even it can be solved using a tricky.

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2007
    @Steve Right underneath the option 'disable script debugging' you'll find an option named 'display notification about every script error'.  Uncheck this and IE will no longer notify you about script errors.  This is disabled by default. @steve_web They probably have good reasons for not placing it back online.  Perhaps IE8 will be written with a different engine.  Or perhaps they found the old one quickly filled up with a lot of repeated and redundant information.  Given the hate out the for MS and IE, there is a fair chance it would be filled with rubbish. If you want it so much, why not open one yourself?  Then let everyone know.  I'm sure there are free options around.

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2007
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    April 06, 2007
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    April 06, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2007
    @Chris Beall, The 2-way correspondence is the critical issue. There were dozens and dozens of bugs filled in the old IE Feedback site, that were originally reviewed by MS staff, and received comments to the effect of "Hmm, we didn't realize that this was broken" to issues that the development community had known about for years. Several hundred thousand developers and web enthusiasts will find bugs in IE faster than any developers/testers/QA team at Microsoft, simply by numbers, and variety of applications. Mozilla Firefox gets 1000's of issues raised in their bug tracking software, on a similar basis, however because of the 2-way communication and community participation, the bugs get narrowed down to simple reproducable test cases, get assigned to a developer/team to fix, and well, get fixed! Without this 2-way communication, IE's quality and standards/spec compliance can never be as good as any other browser out there, whether Safari, Konq, Firefox, Camino, Opera, or whatever. Oddly enough, even with all the anti-MS sentiment out there, most developers just want the issues confirmed, addressed, and fixed. Long story short, if IE is fixed up, and on par with the other modern Web Browsers, then there won't be anything to complain about. There's an old saying that says if you do something right, observers might tell 1 person about the good thing, but if you do something wrong, the observer will tell 9 friends how bad it was. If you bought a Starbucks coffee, and you got an extra nickel back, you'd hardly think it worthy of telling anyone.. But if you handed over a $20, and you only got a quarter back (and there was nothing you could do about it*), you'd be livid, telling everyone you met that day/week/month. *This is what IE bugs are like.. you suffer with an issue, but have no control vote or even say as to getting it fixed. Microsoft, please re-open a public bug tracking tool for Internet Explorer, this isn't a want, or wishful desire.. its a need.

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2007
    @steve_web, re: 2-way communication, I agree completely.  Firefox and the other second-tier (in terms of usage) browsers get good developer support because developers can see the results of their own actions. How many times do you ring a doorbell before you decide nobody's home and just walk away? Chris Beall

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2007
    @all, Back on April 4 I posted my experience trying to report an IE 7 rendering bug to MS.  Here's a followup: I was contacted via email (which I generally prefer over phone calls) by a Support Engineer with the Internet Explorer Development team.  He had reviewed the data already entered into the case record (a first!) and correctly restated the issue.  He then stated that "This is a known bug." and provided me with a workaround which should function across all browsers, i.e. it conforms to standards.  I will need to implement this on all impacted pages as the workaround alters the HTML.  In my case that is trivial, so my issue is resolved. But I did raise two issues with the Support Engineer and his manager:  1. Since this was a known bug with a workaround possible, why was there no KB article on it?  2. Why isn't the bug tracking database public, which would have saved us both the cost of a duplicate bug submission? The answer to the first question was that KB articles are created only for severe or pervasive bugs (mine is neither, depending on your definition of 'severe').  The answer to the second question was that, yes, there was no public access to the bug database. Finally, the engineer suggested "You can always post your question or problem in the msdn forums as they are monitored and answered by our development teams." After perusing the msdn forums, I have responded to that suggestion.  It is not yet apparent whether any further action will result. Chris Beall

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2007
    I just posted a post about the IE Connect database in response to thacker, steve_web and Chris Beall.  I'd love to hear some feedback on it.

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    April 10, 2007
    come here.. the biggest free ebook colelction.. http://www.clickshop2u.com

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    April 10, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2007
    It is sometimes impressive to see gears turning, pistons pumping, and steam blowing, but as both a Web developer and a Web user, none of that makes any difference for me unless something of reasonable quality actually rolls out of the Internet Explorer machine and into the hands of Web users.  Yes, the IE 7 rendering engine is better than that of IE 6, but it still not as good as those of several other Web browsers; the lack of proper XHTML support may not seem like a big deal to many, but the still-horrid CSS support in IE certainly is.  Every employee in every group at Microsoft could jump up and down waving the standards of Web standards and interoperability, but until it seems that all of the supposed enthusiasm is actually going to result in products with better standards support and interoperability in the foreseeable future, the rest of the public seems unlikely to share it. Now that the honeymoon with Internet Explorer 7 is over, the excitement has died down and we are left with the reality that we are in the same situation we were in before: Internet Explorer is inferior to other browsers and Internet Explorer is holding back the Web.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2007
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    April 14, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2007
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  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2007
    Chandra-- The official Microsoft solution for running other versions of IE is to run them on a virtual server. However that is not a practical solution for many. This application will allow you to install IE3 through IE6 on a non-VISTA system with IE7 installed. http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE For those who wish to test linear structure and accessibility usability on the Lynx text only browser with an easy install for Windows [I have not tested the install on VISTA]: http://csant.info/lynx

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2008
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