ZDNet's Richard MacManus has conducted an interview with Chris Wilson, the Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft to discuss the IE7 standards issues that have popped up lately. Wilson recently posted in his blog about claims concerning IE7's non-compliance, essentially saying that today IE is, indeed, behind on standards, but that there is so far no unbiased test for compliance and many claims have been exaggerated. In his interview, MacManus asks Wilson where Internet Explorer 7 is at today in terms of CSS compliance and where it's headed, and Wilson says, "I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50%." Also discussed is the succession of IE7 over IE6 and the challenges of backwards compatibility with sites built for IE6. Though Wilson's answers won't be entirely satisfying for IE-weary web designers or users, it definitely helps to clarify the situation.

Back in February we reported on stirrings related to a brand new design for Yahoo!'s home page, and today Yahoo! is officially showing it off. For me the new design shows up when I go to yahoo.com, but if it doesn't show up for you, try going to yahoo.com/preview. Read/WriteWeb's Richard MacManus has a nice overview of all of the new Yahoo!'s biggest features, but here are the highlights: A bigger search box, a lot more JavaScript and Ajax, more multimedia, an emphasis on news and community, and a new "Personal Assistant" that displays Yahoo! Mail messages, online friends from Y!IM, and local weather, traffic, movies, etc. The new design makes the home page wider, filling a 1024x768 browser window and accomodating a new left-hand navigation bar for accessing Yahoo!'s various services, but there's also a "Page Options" drop-down that lets you switch to a narrower view and even choose a color scheme. Like MacManus, I think the new design isn't just a pretty change of scenery; it really seems to improve on the home page experience and cut down on the "portal bloat" that Yahoo! has fallen victim to over the past decade or so.

Over at ZDNet's Web 2.0 Explorer Richard MacManus rounds up all of the current WebOS offerings. A WebOS, of course, is "a software platform that interacts with the user through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local operating system," and MacManus counts six of them out in the wild, not including the fabled GoogleOS, and in the pull-quote says, "It wouldn't surprise me if one of the small startups I've mentioned here goes on to become the next Linux."