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Markus Mielke, the IE 7 Program Manager writes in the blog posting, 'We understand that we are far from being done and we know we have still a lot of work ahead of us. IE 7 is a stepping-stone in our effort to improve our standards compliance (especially around CSS)'.

The posting follows irritation in the IE development team that they have not been given credit for the efforts they have made in making the next version of the browser more standards compliant.

Commenting on alleged lack of progress in IE 7's standards compliance, Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform wrote in his blog, 'The one thing that really burns my personal toast

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is that we've been working hard to improve our standards support in IE7, and I believe it is simply wrong to think that we've only [improved compliance by] 2 per cent'.

In all, the IE development team claim to have made around two hundred odd 'behavioural changes' which can either mean squashed bugs or new features as it moves towards CSS 2.1 compliance.

Among the changes made are some of the more notorious bugs in Internet Explorer 6.0, including the 'expanding box' issue, the line-height bug and the 'peekaboo' bug as well as addressing a host of other eccentricities such as absolute and relative positioning issues.

Microsoft has also added extra CSS2.1-compliant features such as first-child, adjacent, attribute, child selectors and transparent borders, much of which is already present in alternative browsers such as Safari and Firefox.

The improvements have all been done under the <!DOCTYPE> switch only. Mielke explained that the <!DOCTYPE> switch has been retained because the changes in IE7 meant the 'behavioural updates' had to be more in line with the CSS specification. Similarly, in order to maintain application compatibility, Microsoft says it will not make any behavioural changes to the so-called 'quirks mode' as it has operated since the introduction of IE6.

Finally, Mielke says that the team is already planning for the next IE release and will continue to improve CSS support.