Is IE HTML 4.01 Compliant?

[Randy Yates]

Are there any known areas in which the current incarnation
of IE does not adhere to the HTML 4.01 specification?

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

Are there any known areas in which the current incarnation
of IE does not adhere to the HTML 4.01 specification?

No: it doesn't support the ABBR element. There are probably other
violations as well.

 

[Michael Winter]

[IE] doesn't support the ABBR element. There are probably other
violations as well.

BUTTON is a gross violation. IE submits the innerText equivalent of
the element rather than it's value attribute. Moreover, if there is
more than one BUTTON element (submit or otherwise) in a form, the
name/innerText pair is submitted for /all/ of them, too.

Mike

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Are there any known areas in which the current incarnation
of IE does not adhere to the HTML 4.01 specification?

Certainly. It does not even parse HTML according to the specification.
This is of little practical value since authors don't try to use
shorthand markup, but it's still a definite violation of the
specification.

There are lots of practically relevant violations in different areas.
A good book on HTML explains them in conjunction with the presentation
of various constructs.

 

[DU]

Are there any known areas in which the current incarnation
of IE does not adhere to the HTML 4.01 specification?

HTML 4 conformance tests measure browsers support for HTML 4:
http://www.robinlionheart.com/stds/html4/results

W3C DRAFT - HTML4 Test Suite
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Test/HTML401/current/tests/index.html

A precise list of HTML violations which has been reported to MSIE 7 dev.
team is here:
HTML Support:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerStandardsSupport

Sick of IE6:
http://www.designdetector.com/archives/04/06/SickOfIE6.php

DU