Submitted by “In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: a Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean’s theme, I’d like to talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals.”
mmm never heard of Microsoft EExplorer ….
It’s the new version designed to run on the Eee PC ;}
Ee(w)xplorer? (Sorry, had to)
These MSDN blogs still look like taking the whole blogging thing back in time and space when Windows 3.0 was the latest and greatest in graphics and GUI. Man, I’m glad they stole dynamic letter spacing from Apple, otherwise they would still have everything in Lucida Console.
About the content I kind a like the idea that the IE platform team seems to somewhat hooked on Acid2 now. I mean they never cared much about anything what was going on in the Web outside the Microsoft-space. So this might bring at least some relieve from the browser-specific rendering hell. IE7 was already a step forward.
We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier
Hurray!
msie-centric people writing crappy html code today can keep doing it tomorrow!
Edited 2008-01-23 00:17 UTC
Wait… i have to add a tag to get IE8 following standards as expected with the doctype ?
The tag :
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />
EDIT – I suppose it is easier to add only one tag than doing many hack in your CSS…
Edited 2008-01-23 00:55 UTC
I think this meta tag nonsense is bollocks.
If there’s going to be a new and exciting unnecessary, proprietary tag, they should require it of people who want to opt into IE7/quirks rendering — not people who just want their page rendered according to the standards. Standards mode should be the default for anyone sending a correct doctype, like it is now.
The IE people talk about IE7 “breaking the web” and not wanting to go through that again. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t remember this black day where the web went dark. Sure, some people had to make a tweak here and there (read: rip out the IE CSS hacks they’d put in to compensate for IE 6’s broken behavior), but that was good for the web. IE 7 was a definite improvement, and when the worst browser gets better, everyone gets to move forward. Requiring a meta tag to get standard rendering will just make web developers curse you, IE.
Boo for short term thinking. Businesses can’t just up and scrap their site. And if they do, they will break it for everyone using older browsers.
1. The tag is “meta”. It is NOT a proprietary tag. It’s only a proprietary attribute, and that’s not a problem.
2. Microsoft would be dumb to do anything else. Some companies have spent millions of dollars on crafting their sites to handle IE6 and IE7 – incorrectly, I’d add. Now, Microsoft is saying, if you don’t want us to continue to break the site as we used to, tell us so. I think it’s the right thing to do.
If everybody did things like that we’d never get anywhere. Why should the entire world suffer for the sake of a handful of website designers who were too stupid or lazy to make proper sites in the first place?
No, the entire world will suffer if they don’t do it this way. I don’t think you realize how many sites will behave incorrectly. Not as many people as you think code to standards.
Then they should be FORCED to code to standards by making all their pages BREAK when they use an updated browser. It’s their own damn fault anyway. Why should we as website developers always have to suffer from sloppy coding done by lazy people?
Because it’s better for developers to suffer than customers. That’s what every executive in the world SHOULD say.
If you use any of Microsoft’s tools that output HTML, etc., you’ll likely find that they output incorrect code that is directed toward Internet Exploder.
Many people have no clue about standards and think that everything Microsoft is just fine. Anyone in the industry knows otherwise.
However, you’re not going to convince most governments that they’ll have to re-code everything until it breaks for them. It’s unfortunate that no one has the ability to force compliance with the W3C.
Why don’t Microsoft get it? short term pain for long term gain. Fix up their standards support, get it working properly out of the box – throw away backwards compatibility; give a lead time to developers that they have 1 year before IE7 is support is ended, and then make IE 8 the default.
A small period of pain to finally fix all the issues in one swoop – they have the money, they have the resources, so there is no excuse for them not being able to pull it off. Give that Microsoft is also providing web development tools; ensure that those produce compliant code, then offer customers who are being shafted by Adobe a free copy of the Microsoft web development tools.
Like I said, short term pain for long term gain.
I agree completely, but… the rest of the world is still not convinced that it will make them money to be standards compliant. IE is still in 90% range as access point to the web.
So who cares about the steadily growing number (but still in the 10% range) of people who cannot or will not access IE only pages.
Those expensive, IE6 only, junk sites will only disappear, if users will refuse to use them.
the problem with (and for) Microsoft is the backwards compatibility. IE6 is (unfortunately) still the most used web browser out there, and getting people to upgrade to IE7 (while it’s been pushed as high-priority on Windows Update for a long time now), is not successful enough.
When IE8 comes, it will probably take several years before it’s widely adopted, thus you cannot blame Microsoft to enable some support for smoother transition.
(And please do not mock IE7 in standards support, we know previous versions were horrible but it’s different. While Firefox is my primary browser, I know that it has slightly less standards compliant than IE7. I prefer Firefox for other reasons. AFAIK currently Opera/KHTML are better in standards area).
Edited 2008-01-23 22:51 UTC
Here’s the piece that was missing: if you use DOCTYPE for HTML 5, it will set IE8 to “standard” mode. It does the same for Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
Thus, problem solved.
Too bad IE has yet to support any standard properly.
Whatever… I just wanted to let people know how to get all major browsers into standards mode without using meta tags.