Internet Explorer 8…now with more standards compliance

admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:26:33 +0000

When I first wrote about IE8 and the new HTML 5 standard the plan was that by default IE8 was going to render in the IE7 mode unless you declared it to render in the new IE8 standards mode using a meta tag.

Today, Microsoft announced that this will not be the case. The new standards mode that render the Acid 2 Test with 100% accuracy will be the default mode. If you have an old site that breaks in the new IE8 you will have to go back and add the meta tag or adjust your server to allow for rendering under the older engine (aka quirks mode).

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

Some speculation behind the change points to Opera’s complaint and the recent European Union fine of $1.3 billion dollars for anti-trust tactics by Microsoft, but like any good spin-meister they deny this.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

You can read the rest of the article discussing the various modes at the MSDN blog.

HTML 5, Microsoft IE8 and Backwards Compatability

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:53:29 +0000

In case you haven’t heard the W3C has released the working draft of HTML 5 this week. Microsoft recently released a statement that the pre-alpha versions of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid 2 test. However having achieved this, IE8 will need to break many existing sites, more than IE7 did. Or does it?

Aaron Gustafson has an article on http://www.alistapart.com/ describing a method of “preserving our digital legacy” using a new meta tag. IE8 is implementing this new meta tag to specify which browser engine to render a site with.

If your site works with IE7 and IE8 breaks it, you can implement this little meta tag and tell IE8 to render it as if it were IE7 without recoding your site. Eric Meyer equates this to the classic browser sniffing, but surprisingly agrees with the idea. I can see how Microsoft doesn’t want to break the existing web, but as John Resig points out, they may be doing more harm than good.

The old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” seems to be where Microsoft and the new meta tag are coming from. What happens if it was always broke? At what point do you say, screw it and fix the whole thing regardless of consequences? I know no one wants to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” (sorry for the cliches), but the reality is that IE6 broke the web, developers designed for the broken web and now we have bad code sites and bad coders. We have standards. Every other browser follows them to a relatively satisfactory level. Why not get a beta of IE8 into the community so that those who have sites that break can fix them before the browser is fully integrated to the general consumer? We walked away from 8-tracks with the cassette, we walked away from the cassette with the CD, we walked away from VHS with the DVD. In each case we didn’t concern ourselves with backwards compatibility and I think we need to again.

Gregory Tarnoff » IE8

Internet Explorer 8…now with more standards compliance

HTML 5, Microsoft IE8 and Backwards Compatability