How to make your site Internet Explorer 8 Compatible - Part 3 - Latest CSS Compliance

Posted by admin on March 9th, 2008 at 10:06am

In web development, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation(i.e. information like fonts, colors, spacing, positioning etc.) of a web document. In today’s highly visual web environment css is a very important aspect to look into.
Another important use of css is to separate data part from the visual part/style in html or other markup languages.

Now, the W3C CSS working group has decided the final specifications for CSS v2.1.
The idea is to enable web developers to write their pages once in such a way that it can be rendered properly in many browsers.

The new Web Developer Toolbar included with Internet Explorer 8 will help in this endeavor. Internet Explorer 8 supports the latest feature set as defined in the specification.

While one of Internet Explorer 8’s main goals is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also looking forward towards CSS3. CSS3 is the next generation of Cascading Style Sheets. CSS 2.1 consists of one single document, whereas the CSS3 specification is broken down into different modules to make clear specifications and implementations of different other features.

Another aspect of CSS2.1 which is well-implemented in IE8 is Data URI Support.
Data URIs offer the web developers to embed small external resources (like CSS files or images) directly into a URL on a webpage. The primary use for data URIs is the encapsulation of a binary file inside an URL (a stylesheet or image).
Internet Explorer 8’s data URI implementation attempts to balance security with functionality.

Internet Explorer 8 also includes several Printing Improvements.
IE8 implements all CSS 2.1 pagination recommendations, and provide authors with more control and functionality in the print medium.

With IE8 support has been added for some extra printing constructs e.g. @page rule, Page-break-inside property, windows and orphans property etc.
These improvements give developers more control on content pagination.

More discussion on this and an example can be found at the Microsoft Website mentioned below.

Detailed Information & Example

Under ie8beta1