The 'Standard' is changing again with the upcoming Internet Explorer 7

Microsoft Vista is around the corner and with it comes a new release of the most popular browser on earth, a new Internet Explorer (IE) - version 7.

Generally, I welcome new editions from software houses because it means new exciting features geared to 'making life easier'. But a Microsoft release, I do feel cautious.
Why?
Because it usually means that the design/development & testing effort you've previously made on the launch of the software/web release means you are going to have to re-think your work with any new release. IE7 is no different. Is this really bad or part of the process?

Web designers, when designing web pages, know that the holy grail is ensuring their pages - when being viewed using most browsers & platforms - are displayed/rendered as you intended. Technologies such as XHTML & CSS help in this, along with the automated accessibility & compliance checks which a designer does in ensuring x-compatibility.

(Although not a fan) we all know Netscape Navigator (when it was around) displayed pages correctly, and now-days, Firefox displays well too but of the dominance of IE6 (between 70% - 95% of the market (different countries vary)) a web designer ensures their pages will look as they intended using IE. But with IE7 around the corner, Microsoft has written a web page describing that their new IE7 rectifies issues with IE6 with a spin that IE7 improves on IE6 to better follow W3C guidelines. Their spin :

Internet Explorer 7 contains a number of improvements to cascading style sheet (CSS) parsing and rendering over IE6. These improvements are aimed at improving the consistency of how Internet Explorer interprets cascading style sheets as recommended by the W3C in order that developers have a reliable set of functionality on which to rely.
see fullpage on Microsoft website

Why have I got a bone to pick?
I spent a couple of months at the beginning of 2006 learning Microsoft's newly released ASP.NET 2 / Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 and to aide my learning, I re-built my onemanwebdesign website using all these new releases.

As a 'computer lover', I enjoyed learning the new releases but I also made a decision that when I re-built the site, I took time & effort in ensuring it is both CSS and XHTML 1.0 (transitional) compliant (which it is). But upon viewing the site using with a beta version of IE7, a couple of elements on my site do not render correctly. This means I'll need to re-visit my website to ensure it will look as I intended. Though one important point - although I know this quirk in my website, I am not going to change the site until IE7 has more market share and IE6 is less of the norm.