What won’t be fixed in IE7

From Molly Holzschlag today comes her account of a meeting on Tuesday of the Web Standards Project‘s (WaSP) Microsoft Task Force.

Topics of discussion included Microsoft’s upcoming Web design tool code-named “Quartz”, XAML, Internet Explorer’s approach to the Acid2 test, and plans for WaSP at the SXSW conference in March.

A nugget buried towards the end, however, was Internet Explorer lead program manager Chris Wilson‘s list of things that probably won’t be fixed in IE7:

However, some things simply won’t be there. Generated content? “Won’t make it” Wilson tells us. There’s an overflow problem that probably won’t be fixed, and object for images will most likely not be repaired in IE7.

Wilson remains optimistic and philosophical however, wrapping our conversation up by saying that “I knew when we started IE7 was going to be a challenging release for us, we weren’t going to get as far as people wanted us to get.”

Generated content — or more precisely, support for the CSS2 content property — is no big surprise; support for this is limited at best in most other browsers too. But it’s a shame that perennial sore points like not being able to use the <object> tag for images and a bug with the overflow property, which could affect CSS page layouts, will not be addressed.

That said, Microsoft does seem to be staying true to its stated goal of using IE7 to correct the bugs and issues that most affect Web developers in their ability to get things done, and leaving more “standards for standards’ sake” fixes to IE8.

Now how about that public beta?