Update: CSS and js support in ie Mobile for Windows phone 7

Yesterday, we posted a blog entry that detailed some upcoming JavaScript and CSS support enhancements that we are planning on making to the IE Mobile browser for Windows Phone 7. One of these changes, support for -webkit-text-size-adjust, stirred up a bit of controversy that caused us to stop and think further on the issue.

Our original intent in adding support for this WebKit-specific property was to make Web developers’ lives a bit easier by not having to add yet another vendor-prefixed CSS property to their pages to control how text was scaled. Even more specifically, we intuited that the most common use case for this property was to explicitly set it to “none” in order to tell the browser not to scale a particular section of text.

For example, if you have a picture in your page with an associated caption, you would use this property to prevent the browser from scaling the text, which would cause it to remain on a single line, reflecting the original intent of the designer, as in the following example:

facepalm

After hearing the community’s feedback on this issue (and a couple of face-palms when we realized the broader implications of implementing other browser vendors’ CSS properties), we’ve decided that it’s best to only implement the -ms- prefixed version and not the -webkit- one.

We thank all of the passionate Web contributors who weighed in on the issue, and we’re looking forward to building a great mobile Web browser that all developers can develop for with clarity and certainty.

Best Regards,

Joe Marini
Principal Program Manager
Windows Phone