Internet Explorer 7: Web Developer Troubles

I thought I would compile a list of problems I'm having with IE7. The objective here is not to flame, but to come up with a useful reference list for web developers transitioning and acclimating to Internet Explorer 7. My system is Windows XP SP2.

Browser Rendering Differences

This one blog article could not possibly contain a comprehensive list of differences and problems and problems with CSS rendering, but you can go to the following places to get started. As pretty much everyone knows now, IE7 can read some CSS 2.1 rules that IE6 cannot, but in many cases the actual rules that were being hidden from IE6 are still not rendered properly in IE7. - IEBlog Article with details on the upcoming release of IE7 - De-Hacking IE7 and other articles on PositionIsEverything.Net are an incredible compilation of the findings of web developers worldwide. I have started using IE Conditional Comments to serve changes to all versions of IE. If you want to target IE7 in your CCed stylesheet, use the child combinator (as in html>body p) to serve rules only to IE7 and later. If you have a rule that only needs IE6 adjustment, I find the underscore hack (as in _margin-top: 5px;) works well and is easy to spot in your stylesheet. I haven't found a situation that could not be taken care of with one or both of these techniques. Update: we have also found that using a flavor of the holly hack can allow a developer to target IE7 only. You can read about its workings here. *:first-child+html ... You can use any combination of descendant selectors after that prefix and it is completely valid CSS!

Windows Applications Compatibility

Upon rebooting after the IE7 install, I found that I could not login to any of my sites in the Dreamweaver 8 Site Manager. A quick search turned this Dreamweaver Technote, which provides the solution: Dreamweaver 8 for Windows loses FTP login settings. I only lost saved logins of sites which I attempted to open before applying the patch. If you apply this patch before attempting to load any sites, you will not experience any problems. More will be added to this as we experience new issues. Good luck!