Internet Explorer 7 is nearing the stage that it will be released to the public.

On the whole this is a good thing. There’s no doubt that IE7 is going to be better than IE6. They’ve fixed many of the problem that IE6 suffered from.

In particular, IE6 had many bugs and ‘peculiarities’ with its handling of CSS. Over the years that IE6 has been around, web designers have grown to know, document and create work arounds for these problems.

But now, all of a sudden, IE7 is going to fix these issues and the various CSS hacks that had been created are going to, at best stop working, at worst break web pages badly.

So, if you are a web designer using CSS at any reasonable level, and you’ve had reason to curse the differences in CSS implementations between Firefox/Mozilla and IE, you’d be advised to read this blog post from the IE blog documenting the changes they are making.

Then I suggest you seriously start preparing for what is, like it or not, going to be the biggest web browser release yet.

A few tips for any web designers out there.

• After 6 years, the new version of 1st Page has finally been released. If you’ve not heard of it, its about the nearest thing you’ll get to a free version of Dreamweaver. Arguably better in some ways.
• When you think you’ve finished a web site and its on-line, you could do worse than let the Alexa Site Report give it a once over. They’ll report back to you (but be patient, it can take a while) and give you (among other things) a list of any dead links that it finds in your site. Invaluable, and potentially saves some embarassment.
• Similarly, since we all try to write standards-compliant code (don’t we!?) you should also let the W3 HTML Validator and CSS Validator take a look at your code and fix any problems they report. Standards aren’t just about people being pedantic, they’re the measures against which all current and future web browsers are/will be written. If you conform to standards you’ll be future-proofing your site as best as you can.