In general, I’m not very hopeful about changes in IE7 yet. But this bit in a recent entry in MSDN’s IEBlog made me smile:
“In the process we expect some people relying on the previous behavior to have to update their content otherwise they may find their site doesn’t work exactly as planned.”
It’s about the use of the “<base> tag”, which IE previously allowed to be everywhere in the document, while the specs define that there can be only one and it has to be in the <head>.
As they write it in the blog:
“Now with IE 7 we’ll be ignoring any BASE tags that appear inside of the BODY tag and we’ll only obey the first BASE tag that appears in the HEAD element. For pages that used the old behavior they may now have broken image links or anchors that don’t navigate to the proper locations.”
The funny thing is that they provide a “workaround”:
“The workaround is to move the BASE tag into the HEAD tag and only have one BASE per document per the HTML 3.2 and later specifications.”
I personally wouldn’t call “follow the specs” a workaround, but hey, it’s still IE 😉
Anyway, I didn’t think they would have the courage, but apparently they do. Good! – Now the waiting is for all the other changes that may need more courage than this one 🙂
