While I’m not a huge fan of Internet Explorer, I am quite impressed with the progress the IE team has made. IE7 stands to be the most impressive release so far, with many rendering issues resolved, rather impressive security advances, and a great many improvements on the standards compliance front. I must applaud both the team, and Microsoft for making these moves.

By focusing on standards, instead of proprietary features that degrade the experience for everybody, developers can work towards a unified web, free of browser discrimination and hack filed code. It seems like the Redmond power house has finally started to see where IE needs to go to remain relevant for Web 2.0, and beyond.

Then again, that’s leaving TIME out of the picture.

While HTML + TIME could prove to be a fun toy, due to its very nature – it’s a toy not everybody could enjoy. This is an older (introduced with IE5), proprietary technology that is fairly unknown, and not often used. While it does have some merits in its concept, any design technology that is intended to serve a single, closed platform is simply a bad idea.

Why Microsoft is taking another look at this, I’m really not sure. I’m holding out hope that they are cleaning up old, non-standard features in preparation for the next release. My fear is that they want to make another push with this out-dated, IE-centric technology.

Let’s hope they make the right call, and remove support for proprietary ‘features’ such as this. IE7 has the chance to not only catch up with the other major players, but to help push the widespread adoption of standards compliance.