A Prediction about IE7

I’m not in the habit of making predictions, although I really do enjoy seeing trends and wondering where they’ll go, but I do have a prediction about the upcoming IE7 browser, currently in beta.

Before I get to my prediction, I must say that I’m really impressed with the IE team this time around: they seem to be listening to developers, which is an area that they have been poor in during the last few years. The efforts of folks like Molly Holzschlag and others who are working on behalf of the WaSP are really great, and I think the eventual outcome is that developer’s lives will be easier, and MS will get much better publicity than they currently have.

OK, my prediction:

If IE7 supports the “table” value applied to the “display” property (as in display:table), then you’ll see a huge migration to using this instead of using either floats or absolute positioning.

In fact, I’ve used this technique on a production site, and it works fine even now. On Safari and Firefox it looks like a table. On current versions of IE (which don’t support display:table), it simply looks like one big column.

You can see my implementation here: http://uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/