Since the Beta 1 release, however, the program manager for Internet Explorer, Chris Wilson, has made the unprecedented move of promising at least partial Cascading Style Sheet 2 support in the Beta 2 version.

Still, other sources say Microsoft will not move toward the pending CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 standards.

"Beta 1 of IE 7.0 was released to bloodshed," said Molly Holzschlag, a Web designer and author as well as maintainer of a Weblog at Molly.com.

A former contractor at Microsoft, her public support of the company's efforts has drawn fire from other blogging Web designers.

Holzschlag is also a member of the Web Standards Project, which has also made public its support for the development of IE 7.0.

"Beta 1 has very little in the way of improving standards support," Holzschlag said; she reiterated Wilson's statement that Microsoft had focused on security features for that build.

Holzschlag said that standards support was a target for the second beta of IE 7.0. Wilson also said that "this will be better in Beta 2" on his blog.

Holzschlag said she was surprised to see this information made public, as the week prior to Wilson's posting, she had been told that this part of the IE 7.0 roadmap was confidential.

"There are two major things that Microsoft needs to do with IE that ares not in any build," Holzschlag said.

First, she said, that it needs to repair "a lot of things that have partial or poor implementation."

Second, she said, Microsoft needs to implement some standard CSS 2.0 features such as CSS selectors, fixed positions and other items.

Dori Smith, an author and speaker on Web programming and also a member of the Web Standards Project, said the importance of CSS compliance "goes back to what the WSP was saying seven years ago."

She said that Web-standard features offer "so much potential, but you can't take advantage of them unless everyone [developers of Web browsers] are on board."

"IE for Windows is the 800-pound gorilla," Smith said, referring to the importance of being able to present coherent Web pages to people browsing on Windows-based PCs and using Internet Explorer, which is built in.

Due to current versions of Internet Explorer not fully supporting standards including CSS 2, Web developers often have to rely on hacks to make pages appear correctly in that browser; these hacks often break compatibility with more standards-friendly browsers.

As a result, many developers have to build multiple versions of the same Web site—a time-consuming process.

And, Smith said, "in a lot of cases, we don't even use the better solution," as it is unworkable in Internet Explorer.

Holzschlag says she agrees. "Though it's very difficult for any browser to say it has complete support for anything," she said, "the fact that IE 6 is limited in its CSS support means we have to hack code to make Web pages cross-platform and cross-browser."

"At least we now feel that Microsoft is listening and is heading toward reducing the need for these hacks," Holzschlag said.

When asked why Microsoft's Web browser had fallen so far behind in support for published standards, Holzschlag said that there was a day that IE had advanced CSS support (IE 5.0 for the Mac, released in 2000, was the first Web browser to have nearly complete CSS 1 support), but that day was long ago.

"Here's what I believe happened," she said. "Microsoft believed that other issues were more important," she said, "and since Microsoft owned the market, they felt no pressure to improve and pulled resources away." The result, she said, was that "IE was not rebuilt for about five years" aside from fixes for security problems, she said.

"Obviously IE has a lot of catching up to do," Holzschlag said, "so they're putting their effort into meeting CSS 2 standards," which, she said, are the current W3C recommendation.

CSS 2.1 was envisioned as making development easier for browser manufacturers, because it dropped certain hard-to-implement elements and redefined others to dovetail with existing usage.

CSS 2.1 nearly reached recommended status in early 2004 but was redefined as a working draft in 2005.

Ironically, should the final version of IE 7 reach CSS 2 compliance, and CSS 2.1 becomes the approved standard, IE may need to be updated backward to previous object handling behaviors.

Holzschlag said that one thing she sees from the recent process is that Microsoft, at least in its Web tools departments, has had to adapt to the way the Web works.

"This is a big shift for Microsoft," she said. "On the Web, ideologically, it's a technology-first model, not proprietary-first—it's not like Office."

Holzschlag said she sees Microsoft having to change its business model to succeed. "With the advances Firefox has made in the last year," she said, "you better believe they're shaking in their boots."

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