Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 25th Jan 2008 13:00 UTC, submitted by gonzo
"Internet Explorer 8 is going to be the most standards-compliant IE yet, but it's going about it in a way that has some people scratching their heads. With Internet Explorer 8, you have a choice in standards compliance modes. Sound oxymoronic? Shouldn't there be one standards mode by default? Heck, shouldn't the only mode be standards mode? Ah, idealism." Please note, however, that John Resig of Mozilla Corporation spotted something interesting: "Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5). This really does change any frustration that someone should have concerning the new meta tag. This means that you can write your web pages in a completely standards-based way (CSS, HTML5, JavaScript) and not have to use a single browser-centric tag in order to do so."
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Member since:
2005-11-09
Actually, version targeting is a very good idea. It means that your content will always be rendered as intended, even by new browsers (when they support the feature). It was a brain child of the Web Standards Project who was asked by MS to help them with reaching standards compliance.
So, if FF and Opera support the feature in the future, I can say "this page was designed for these browsers" and IE, FF and Op will read their respective tags and switch their rendering to those modes and properly display my page.
As an author, I find that extremely good as it lets me update the code on my time table rather than live with a broken page on new browsers and have to work in crisis mode to fix the problems.
It is true, until IE 6 usage drops to IE 5 usage levels, this will not stop the "fix the quirks" issues that IE 6 creates, but in a few years, when we have IE 7 and up as the major IE, and FF 3.5 and Opera 10.5 and safari 4 are the major browsers taking up 98% of the market, I can ensure that I design once, and update only if I wish to make use of new features.