Standards Documentation for IE7 and IE8

Over the last month, as part of Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability, we’ve published information for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 describing variations from certain web standards. Today we published another set of documentation which includes information about how IE extends these web standards:

  • [MS-CSS21E]: Internet Explorer Extensions to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Level 2 and DOM Level 2 Style Specifications
  • [MS-DOM2CE]: Internet Explorer Extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification
  • [MS-DOM2CEX]: Microsoft XML Extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification
  • [MS-ES3]: Internet Explorer ECMA-262 ECMAScript Language Specification Standards Support Document
  • [MS-ES3EX]: Microsoft JScript Extensions to the ECMAScript Language Specification Third Edition
  • [MS-HTML401E]: Internet Explorer Extensions to HTML 4.01 and DOM Level 2 HTML Specifications
  • [MS-ISO10646]: Microsoft Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) Standards Support Document
  • [MS-ISO8859]: Microsoft 8-bit Single-byte Coded Graphic Character Sets Standards Support Document
  • [MS-XMLSTYL]: Microsoft XML Associating Style Sheets with XML Standards Support Document

In addition to publishing these new documents we also refreshed the previous content based on your feedback. We have received feedback both through the blog comments here and privately and I’m very grateful for the time spent to so thoroughly review the information. Today’s release completes the documentation for the relevant final-approved web standards from W3C, ECMA, and ISO and I’d like to encourage you to send me feedback to help us make further improvements. You can leave comments here or post questions or comments to the Documentation on Standards User Forum on MSDN.

While most of the interoperability information we have provided relates to final approved web standards (for example a Recommendation from the W3C), CSS 2.1 is the exception. We have discussed in the past how important we believe interoperable CSS 2.1 is to the web development community. Having a comprehensive test suite available from the W3C is one aspect of ensuring that interoperability and publishing documentation about where product behaviour varies is another. Because CSS 2.1 is still a W3C Candidate Recommendation we will update our documentation should the specification change and as the test cases in the test suite become officially approved by the working group. We will do this until the standard reaches final approved Recommendation status.

Adrian Bateman
Program Manager