IE7

[francis]

Oh. My. God. Download and install, download and install (http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/intro/)! Some genius called Dean Edwards has written patches for IE and called it IE7. This seems to work in some kind of automagical way and, just by bumping some JavaScript, XML and CSS files in the server root and calling one stylesheet, IE can now support:

Fixed positioning
<abbr> tag
:first-child
:last-child
:root
:empty
min-width
min-height
max-width
numerous attrbute selectors
different adjacent sibling selectors
PNG opacity (although can't get this working in IE5 at work)

Ooh! So, the question is, if one guy can do this using JS, XML and CSS and it works, why hasn't MS done this? Never mind, this has vastly improved a rubbish day!

[David]

That IS amazing. The implementation appears so simple that it must indeed be magic. It appears that your installation of IE5/6 is not altered at all and that the sleight of hand all happens on the server. I don't understand how that can work (especially things like PNG alpha transparency) but if it does (w00t)

[James]

So does this mean you just add the code to a website and IE will render things nicely?

Or is it a plug in thing that the user has to download onto their IE?

If the latter, I can't see it working as there are billions of IE users ....

or am i just being silly?

[francis]

Nope - just try it out on that site. Adjacent sibling selectors work, the <abbr> tag works, frikken attribute selectors work! This means that you can now do this:

input{
border:1px solid;
}

input[type=radio]{
border:none;
}

Voila - no annoying borders around radio buttons, but around every other type of input.


It's still alpha code and there's a problem with (drum roll please) memory leaks on occaisons. But no, not a plugin. I had it working at work just viewing pages as I would on any other site. Bung on server, configure code, add a couple of lines of code to any web page you want it to work on. Job done.

Automagical.