Preparing Your Site For Internet Explorer 7
Author: Adam McFarland

Here's the scenario: one morning you open your email and your
inbox is flooded with emails that your site isn't working
properly. Maybe your text or images don't look right, or even
worse maybe your site isn't properly processing credit card
transactions. How could this happen when you didn't change a
thing? Well, that morning could be the morning later this year
that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.

How are people going to get IE7?

According to Kevin Yank in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tech
Times
(http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=3&issue=147&format=html ):


"Word on the street is that, upon its release (before year's
end), IE7 will be pushed out as a forced update to Windows XP
users everywhere, as was done for Service Pack 2. The move to
IE7 among the end-user masses will not be a gradual migration,
but a sudden and significant shift."

One night Windows XP users will go to bed using IE6 and the
next morning they'll wake up, install a routine update, and
just like that they'll be using IE7 to browse the web. That
means, that as a site owner, you need to begin preparing
immediately for IE7's impending release.

What's different about IE7?

From a user's perspective, improvements include tabbed
browsing, better printing, RSS feed integration, more advanced
searching, and better security features, as well as a plethora
of add ons to enhance the user experience (similar to Firefox
extensions).

However, the most important changes that will have a more
direct impact on how your site is loaded and displayed are:

RSS integration – IE7 automatically detects RSS feeds and asks
you to subscribe. It also gives you the option to have IE7
auto-check for feed updates (even when it's not running). Is
your feed properly recognized by IE7?

Updated CSS behavior – the IE7 team worked very closely with
the W3C workgroup to ensure standards compliance. They made
over 200 changes from IE6 to become compliant with CSS2.1. Even
if your site is standards compliant, it may not be rendered
exactly the same as it is in IE6 or Firefox.

AJAX XMLHTTP Request changes – the IE blog states: "to have
your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should
be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one)
first to see if it's available before instantiating the ActiveX
control, instead of the other way around"

Added security features – everything from more secure SSL
defaults to disabling most Active X controls by default has
been changed to help make the user's browsing experience more
secure. These changes could drastically change your users
browsing and purchasing experience.

You can get full details on all of the changes by visiting the
IE Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/category/8680.aspx)

What you should do?

The only way to know for sure how your site will work in
Internet Explorer 7 is to download it and try. The IE7 team
recently released Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1
(RC1), which can be downloaded on the Internet Explorer web
site ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx). I'd
recommend downloading IE7 on a computer other than your primary
machine (you still want IE6 on your primary machine at least
until IE7 is officially launched). RC1 is essentially the final
version of how IE7 will display sites when launched, so if your
site passes the test now you'll likely be OK when IE7 is
released for real.

In testing my sites there were a few instances where my site
worked flawlessly in Firefox and IE6, but had small problems in
IE7. The changes I needed to make were minimal, but regardless
of how well you code there could still be some potential
problems. It's better to find and fix them now than to wake up
one morning and have hundreds of customer complaints!


About The Author: Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize
(http://www.iPrioritize.com) - web based to-do lists that help
people and businesses organize their tasks. Email, print, check
from your mobile phone, subscribe via RSS, and share with
others.