I haven’t whinged about Inter­net Explorer for some time now, at least, not on this web­site, so I feel justified.

The background prop­erty in CSS has the attribute fixed for a rea­son. Inter­net Explorer sup­ports this, but fails to inter­pret it in the same way as every other visual UA on the planet — the back­ground is fixed rel­a­tive to the ele­ment, not the page.

This is spec­i­fied in the W3C Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets (Level 1) rec­om­men­da­tion (Yes, it is a rec­om­men­da­tion, not a stan­dard. If “web stan­dards” peo­ple are going to obsess over geek seman­tics, you’d think they would care a lit­tle more about the mean­ing of real words, as well. Appar­ently not.), which Inter­net Explorer claims to have full sup­port for.

That part of the spec­i­fi­ca­tion appears a lit­tle ambigu­ous on first read­ing, but seri­ously, what makes greater log­i­cal sense, in terms of the actual appli­ca­tions of the tech­nol­ogy?! Keep­ing in mind this is a rec­om­men­da­tion, if there is ambi­gu­ity (which is clar­i­fied by con­tex­tual read­ing and gen­eral under­stand­ing of the mate­r­ial at hand), then it is the respon­si­bil­ity of any rec­om­men­da­tion imple­men­tors to apply their own best-practice poli­cies to this, in order to clar­ify it.

Best prac­tice at Microsoft, it would seem, encom­passes flawed “full” imple­men­ta­tions of a tech­nol­ogy, with an eye firmly set in the past. Com­ments such as those made recently at IEBlog excus­ing these fail­ures anger me, espe­cially given the bla­tant irrel­e­vance of defences used in rela­tion to poor sup­port of W3C rec­om­men­da­tion technology.

</rant class=“off”>

Tags: actual applications, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer claims, microsoft, recommendation technology, W3C recommendation technology, Web Standards