IE 7 Information Index and CSS

No doubt half the blogsphere has already blogged on this, but I thought I'd share a couple links that I think will become important to anyone involved in web development. I saw news today on the SitePoint blogs that the IE 7 release candidate is out.

I'm quite impressed that Microsoft has set up this IE 7 Information Index page, which has links to dozens of articles and information pages about various aspects of IE 7. One of the most interesting areas was the new "Windows RSS platform." I heard something the other day that the vast majority of people still have no idea what an RSS feed is, so hopefully this full embracing of RSS by Microsoft will change that somewhat. One of the parts of the "Windows RSS platform" is that application developers can hook into it to do things such as hooking into RSS-related events.

Most web designers and developers paying attention to IE 7 at this point are looking at the CSS-related changes. This article by the Microsoft IE 7 team, Details on our CSS changes for IE7, and all the related comments, is enlightening. Microsoft's CSS and standards-related progress is encouraging, but like a lot of people I'm still bitter that Microsoft a) took a non-standards-based approach in the first place, and b) practically mothballed Internet Explorer as a product, probably setting the web back three or four years in the process. Yay monopoly! And cheers to Mozilla Firefox for putting Microsoft to shame and getting things going again.

And to be fair, cheers to the people currently behind IE 7, who are clearly doing their best to make up for past sins.

Dan