Update

Hurray! The IE team are now shifting their focus to fixing up the ol’ DOM support. Excellent news! If you have any constructive feedback, or can provide a good test case for a known JavaScript bug, head on over to the Web Standards Project post on the topic, or have a look at their growing wishlist (invitation only). Great work, guys!

(Original post)

Much has been made recently of IE7’s improved support of HTML and CSS standards. This is to the great relief of web designers everywhere, and thanks in large part to organisations like The Web Standards Project.

But something major has been left out.

The current state of the art of interface development has shifted lately to the area of JavaScript, as highlighted by the trends in AJAX and DOM scripting. While these technologies can provide solutions that are much more elegant than those available a few years ago, the lack of standardized DOM support has led the more industrious to build vast libraries to accommodate the code branching required to provide anything resembling cross-platform compatibility.

Despite its claims to the contrary, IE6 has particularly poor support for the W3C DOM standard (see Trident column). How much time and how many lines of code could be saved if IE7 attached events in a standard way, or implemented the get/set/hasAttribute methods properly, for example? Isn’t this why standards are created?

Microsoft has this to say on the issue:

Dave Massy [MSFT] (Moderator):
Q: what version of ECMA javascript IE7 final will support? 1.4 ? 1.5 ?
A: we are not expecting any changes in JScript support in IE7. This is definitely something we want to address in a future release but for IE7 we needed to prioritise our work for developers around the CSS issues.

This was transcribed from a chat in the MSDN Expert Zone, on February 9, 2006. Disappointingly, this was the most relevant quote I could find from Microsoft. Very little information about IE7’s expected level of DOM support is available. However, just a few days after the release of IE7 Beta 2, there are already grumblings in the community about the problems it fails to address. Here is a screenshot of the W3C DOM module support chart that tests the browser you are viewing with, as seen with IE7. I will do some test labs as soon as I have a chance. A brief stint on quirksmode’s test pages don’t look encouraging.

In July 2005, the Web Standards Project created a DOM Scripting Task Force to address this problem. Their site is an excellent resource for anyone with an interest in JavaScript. However, they are worryingly quiet on the topic of encouraging DOM standards support in IE7, instead espousing good programming practices to deal with the problem.

Grassroots "encouragement" went a long way towards the effort to get IE to improve standards support for HTML and CSS. Although increased DOM standards support was mentioned from the beginning, it was usually along the lines of "Please fix the appalling CSS bugs, and then maybe the DOM if you don’t mind." Now that the worst is fixed for CSS standards support, maybe it’s time to move our focus back to the DOM.