As insider news starts spreading regarding IE 7.0, we hear a lot of good and bad things. One question that a lot of web developers had in their brains–and now is becoming clearer–is, “Will Microsoft finally make IE CSS2 compliant?” On the developer side, this very likely is the largest complaint about IE.

Check out this article:
eWeek: CSS Support Could Be Internet Explorer’s Weakest Link.

As the title of this post clearly indicates, the answer to that question is, “No.” In fact, Microsoft is arguably taking the worst action possible: They will alter (read: “enhance”) support for CSS2, but not fully support it at this time. If you still won’t be supporting this very important standard, wouldn’t it be wiser to just leave your support how it is? Think of the consequences; your alteration to your CSS support will force developers to update code for their sites if they want to keep them clean in IE (which every developer should do, since IE users still represent the majority of web traffic), yet the updates will serve no purpose other than to maintain compatibility with Microsoft, rather than the more noble–and thus more acceptable–purpose of delivering CSS2 compliance to their site.

Thus, when Microsoft finally decides to fully support CSS in IE, developers will be forced to update again.

And the reason for Microsoft’s reluctance? According to sources, Microsoft considers CSS2 a “flawed” standard. Sorry, Microsoft, but between IE and CSS2–even if CSS2 is flawed–I’ll take the lesser of two evils.