Paving the road for CSS layouts

Not like it's really news anymore, but the IE team published some details on IE7 beta 1. Oh all right, they only said it'll have PNG alpha support as well as CSS compatibility fixes, but at least that's something the web community wanted to hear.
Putting aside the discussion on whether the new version of IE will win back converts from Firefox and Opera, I find the most interesting aspect to be the new possibilities for CSS layouts. They are quite doable already, but with IE's enhanced support, even the most stubborn table-defenders are going to have to reconsider their position. With the bugs gone, CSS layouts will no longer be the tricky magic they've used to be. Rather, they'll hopefully be an everyday alternative for projects ranging from trivial to extremely complex.
One more important aspect: The slow browser upgrade/adoption rate has traditionally been a hindrance to the evolution of browsers. I believe this particular problem is subsiding. Here the key factor is called automatic updates. Predictions are dangerous, but I'll make one: When IE7 is out, most of IE6 will vanish in a relatively short period of time. We'll then have a set of IE5.x browsers (and some IE6s too, of course) running on older platforms with less aggressive update schemes than Windows XP – and a majority of users with IE7 or Firefox. Now guess which family of browsers is going to be the next Netscape 4?

April 24, 2005 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Posted in: Web