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IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
notamicrosoftlover writes to tell us Channel9 is reporting that Internet Explorer 8 has correctly rendered the Acid2 page in "standards mode". "With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle." There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9."
If it takes until version 8 to support Acid 2, or 2^3,
then, when Acid 3 comes out, we can expect conformance by IE27?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think the holyshit tag would be appropriate here.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"standards mode" IE will only be available for vista.
Would anyone mind if they had rewrite their web pages or at the very least, remove the code that checks for the version of IE and if it is IE in the first place? I wouldn't mind.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Acid test? Ok... but can it withstand a chair?
Why UNIX?
I guess when Bill Gates asks what the hell is going on, he gets results!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm pretty anti-MS, but this can only be a good thing as far as I can tell.
This article is like saying web developers who wrote HTML for Mosaic shouldn't rewrite their code to fit ACTUAL standards, but rather modify their code to work best with Mosaic. ...,5,6,7,8,...
IE is such bloat-ware to begin with, why don't they just have the browser analyze the code, and see which engine it will render with better, IE
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
I wonder if IE7 will go the way of WinME. In a few years time, will M$ answer the question "What about IE7?" with a resounding "IE7??? There was never an IE7. IE7 is a figment of your imagination. FORGET!!!!... FOOOORGET..."
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
How well is Opera's lawsuit with M$ going to go over with this news?
Good News: ...
... in the year 2012 (give or take a few years), when the percentage of web users using IE 5, 6 or 7 finally dips below 5%.
Web developers will finally be able to develop a page once, according to standards, and have it work on all major browser
Bad News:
After all, how hard is it to build a special case for one specific website?
Woooooo! This is awsome!
But now i'm worried about this whole HTML5 clusterfuck submarining XHTML2, and thus the posibility of using a sane declarative language in the future.
Jeremy
How inconvenient is it to switch into and out of standards mode? Do you have to navigate menus or is there a button on the statusbar? Will it automatically switch between the two, based on whether or not the site demands IE7 or not? Is standards mode on by default?
No rush Microsoft, Firefox and Opera work just fine for me and everyone that I know.
This isn't for them, this is for the serious web developers that currently have to bend over backwards to get their website to render correct on IE and non-IE browsers.
What have we seen recently?
The people behind the Phantom actually releasing a product
A Duke Nukem Forever teaser
Dell promoting Linux
IE8 passing Acid2
What's next?
Dogs living with cats??
That's not necessarily true. There are graceful ways to deprecate commonly used design elements, even those specific to IE (read: hacks). It's been my experience that once someone says, "ok, this still works but it's going away" developers shun it like the plague for anything in active development, and rightly so.
Wow, talk about moving the goalposts. It's reasonable to expect a Web browser to adhere to standards -- so when IE finally does, the new reason to hate MS is because IE also supports the pages that are on the Web today?
Making IE8 render pages the way IE7 does is the smart way to go for Microsoft. If people woke up one morning and none of their sites looked right, they'd be rightfully pissed off. IE8 will give people the time to make their "crap code" standards-compliant ... though if they haven't done it by IE9, they might be shit out of luck.
Oh, and BTW -- as long as people are coding, there will always be crap code. Standards will not make crap code go away.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
What's really holding the web back is the quirks mode which still exists in IE7, and will exist in IE8. If Microsoft is serious about standards support, they need to stop supporting 'web designers' who right non-compliant code.
So Taco wants me to believe that:
A) duke nukum might actually see the light of day
B) ie 8 passes Acid 2
Its not april fools day, according to the snow outside. Is Taco trying to create another practical joke day: Dec 19?
Thats so awesomely random, but it sort of upstages my plans of trying to make Dec 20 th a joke day. Oh well pretended to be surprised when crazy things happen tomorrow as well.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
IE8's release date has been pushed back 3 months.
Is anyone else having trouble with the acid2 page? Safari and Firefox 3.0 beta 1 are failing to render it in the same way.
Standards mode is invoked when you specify a strict doctype in the page.
This IS out of the box support. Let's have less false assumptions and cheap shots at Microsoft, okay?
Am I the only one who thinks it's hilarious how thorough the author is in proving that this is really true. There's a screenshot of the test, video, and even a screenshot of the checkin.
It's almost like think we don't trust them or something.
"Standards mode" is out-of-the-box, assuming you use a proper doctype in your HTML. More info here.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
if ((story != open source)(isM$)(avg(scorepoints) = 3))
{
return string ("Microsoft did something good, even though it took them a while?");
}
Well, I code to standards. Now I can be reasonably assured that I won't need to write an IE8 version of any website I make.
I just need a standards compliant version and an IE6 version!
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web.
Soooo... since you have created a community of non-standard web development practices in an otherwise open and standards-based world-wide community, you still feel like you should defend those who followed you in your path of non-standard lock-inery. No thanks. Suck it up and admit you made a big mistake by painting yourself into a corner.
This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7's CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded.
Actually, that sounds exactly like your first goal. "As they were coded" really means "As they were coded to work with our non-standards-based web browser". Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.
Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE.
I'd like to hear about the 'pre-dated standards' you speak of. Most likely, You're talking about practices you implemented in IE that wandered from existing standards, which maybe became stabilized post-M$ implementation. You can't defend non-standardization by blaming the standards for being STANDARDS. If you break standards that everyone is supposed to adhere to, its YOUR fault, NOT those who didn't embrace your specific practices as their own, personal standards.
We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. We'll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8 beta cycle."
How about just making IE8 as standards-based as the other players in the field instead of feeling like you are required to ween your followers from your own sour milk?
As far as I'm concerned, the underlying goal is (and always has been for M$) in the very $ at the end of M$ that has become so popular for many. You can't mask the underlying motive with excuses like what you have given.
Suck it up and play by the rules, or you'll eventually be kicked out of the game.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Firefox has a "old and broken" mode too...
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.
Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.
Is that a joke, or are you just a troll? Did you ever develop webpages? I mean, standards-compliant ones? And then tried viewing them with IE6?
The point is not allowing people to write crap code, but having hacky code written because of a crappy browser still render right, while having standards-compliant pages render correctly too.
Some developers are more lazy than others and some languages encourage laziness more than others. Scripting languages encourage more laziness because they are less strict. So having a bloated browser that allows for a million variations of the same code seems to me to be not an advantage in the longrun to anyone... just a sidestep to an eventual problem that needed to be answered years ago but Microsoft still refuses to answer.
And this is why Firefox continues to steal it's market share.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
asleep? So, I get home really tired and go take a nap... Then, I wake up, log on slashdotm, and that's the headlines I read: - Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Released - IE 8(!) Passes Acid2 Test(!!!!) I'm sure there's an twilight zone episode just like that!
Embrace, extend, extinguish round two!
Now that we broke the web with our own version of standards, we're going to break it again with the real standards.
It'll also be nice it it handles transparent PNGs properly with nothing more than an <img> tag--like how IE/5 Mac did almost eight fucking years ago. Here's how much progress they had made as of 6/2006. (Yeah, it's been a while, and maybe they've fixed that, but c'mon.... it was 2006!) Too bad they lined up the Mac guys against a wall and shot them, ensuring that it would take almost a decade to get that one feature into IE/Win.
Feel free to correct me if I've made any factual errors in this post.* Flame if you want, but nicely worded, verifiable responses are preferred and worth a lot more to readers in general.
* aside from the part about shooting the Mac team--I'm (pretty) sure that didn't happen.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I smell a rat. Everybody, you know what not to do with this new TLD link!
The point? The point is I can write proper CSS now, without having to worry about how IE will fuck it up. I can use alpha channels in png's and all sorts of things without writing it two different ways, so it will render across all browsers. I don't care about how crappily written the rest of the web is, I can write my little bits of it properly. Standards compliance isn't about punishing content authors that don't adhere to the standard. It perfectly alright to be lenient about non-validating code. But validating code needs to be rendered properly, and Microsoft seems to be getting that point at last.
...google for how to take a screenshot on linux... I do not think I trust your findings... Ad hominem FTW!!!.. ;P ... j/k
Who said "standards mode" is a feature that does not work out of the box? Just because it is a mode does not mean it requires it to be set manually.
Also remember that Microsoft has several HTML rendering engines (Trident, the one used in Office 2007 (sucks)). There's nothing stopping them from developing two separate rendering engines, one that is standards compliant and the other not. Let the developer pick which method to use, tagsoup/crap or 100% standards-compliant, and simply switching between the two.
Less cheap shots at Microsoft??? You must be new here!
The concept of "standards mode" and "quirks mode" has been around for several years, and is implemented in IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Opera, and for all I know in Gecko as well. The user does not have to flip a switch. The developer has to put some code at the beginning to show that he knows what he's doing, usually in the form of an appropriate DOCTYPE.
Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than the fixes? With the standard breaking IE6, random "updates" that makes IE7 css hacks useless, and now a new "standard compliant" IE8 that may or may not contain other bugs The task of writing pages to support IE6, IE7, IE8 will become equivalent to travelling on a mine field, a melting glacier and an active volcano in 3 parallel universes in the same car at the same time
So, in your opinion they should have released a browser that ONLY (or by default) worked in "standards mode", and in the process broken thousands of websites written to work properly for IE7.
Only a FireFox/Opera shill could possibly think that breaking existing websites would be a good thing.
It doesn't require the USER to turn on "standards mode", it is done by the DOCTYPE specified by the web page itself. This is nothing new, the current versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. do the same thing.
Here's more info on the process:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/
Actually, "Standards" and "Quirks" Mode are triggered by a doctype declaration within the HTML itself. It's not toggled by a big red browser button. It's not IE-specific, either.
What about the eyes turning blue when the mouse moves over it?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More like: Acid2 was released when IE6 was current, and will be passed in IE8. 6+2=8. So if Acid3 is announced while IE8 is current, version 8+3, or IE 11, will be the first to pass Acid3.
So if we want anything new supported by IE 10, we need to get that Acid3 test developed now!
IE7 is demonstrably more secure -- at least on Vista and IE8 can pass Acid. What will /.ers complain about next? The UI?
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Sorry if that's not inflammatory enough. I could try harder. I must say, though, this is good news and I'm glad the IE 8 team is working on this. Better late than never. Oh, and I can't get Firefox 2 or the beta of 3 to pass Acid2 either.
While we're on the subject of Firefox, whose bright idea was it to solve the memory leaks in 2.0.0.8 or so by making 2.0.0.11 use more and more processor time instead of more memory? Seriously, it's easy enough to kill a 200 MB Firefox instance and reopen the browser, but this 97% processor usage is just a pain in the ass. Infinite loops are not progress. I don't have to worry about that particular problem in any version of IE I've ever seen from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive.
A reason to install Vista ;-)
Bingo. Mod parent up - an obvious dot-on.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Hrrrmm... I always thought Microsoft's philosophy was "Embrace, Extend, Destroy".
But now they're adopting standards?
Either:
1) Someone spiked my coffee.
2) I'm dreaming.
or
3) Steve Ballmer hasn't heard about this yet.
So, how functional will this compatibility mode be? Maybe like user mode in XP? Like the blame-shifting mechanism UAC in Vista?
Allow or Deny this comment?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I meant "for all I know in WebKit as well." Gecko, of course, is the engine used by Firefox.
Why was this modded flamebait btw?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
If Microsoft were to be just a tad bit firm and move to a full standards compliant mode and ask the rest of the world to move forward as well, they would. Opera is already there and Firefox would actually have to play a little catch (but not much). And the developers of the world would finally all be on the same page and we wouldn't have to worry about building for different versions anymore.
That's MY point... rather than some half ass attempt at saying 'here's is a standards compliant mode but you don't have to use it'.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Well, the fact that they've finally decided to speak the browser language that the rest of the world is (working towards) using is an obvious sign that they've given up on the "make it for our browser and it will become the standard" tactic - "MS hacks" aren't called that for nothing, as standards for webmasters obviously lie elswhere than a cowed acceptance of the "majority browser". Even the majority (of those using IE) can be wrong - especially when they don't know a thing about standards or the behaviour of the browser they're using. Users only know if a website works; it's the role of webmasters to know/decide/apply standards, and to go through all the hell required because of browsers that refuse to follow them.
I'm glad that they've given up - yes, now to see what other tactic they will take, but no need to speculate. i can only be glad that they're finally making life easier for webmasters/designers.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
> I don't see how anyone could have fixed all that bloated crap code so fast for starters.
Define fast. IE 7 was released more than year ago.
Also, how well do you know IE code to judge it as bloated crap?
More likely they've had standards support all along, and just have a registry entry they could change to enable real standards mode. Kinda like how NT Workstation could be turned into a pretty close approximation of NT Server by flipping a couple of bits.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
For some values of "late". I mean, IE8 could come out years from now. By the time IE8 comes out it could be behind in the standards discussed in this article. It could even come out and support less than the article claims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't MS often break the promises it makes?
With all the puling about IE not being compliant with the arbitary standards set by a bunch of MS-haters, I've always been amazed at how poorly non-MS browsers do about conforming to IE standards.
Guess there's a little bit of a double standard going on, but of course all the MS-haters would rather complain than think about what's best for their customers. If you want to refer to people leeching free software as customers.
if ( standards mode) {
Load FF 3 renderer
}
else {
Load IE 7 renderer
}
Will it only be available for Vista users? The build path of the project is as follows: //depot/longhorn_ie8/Inetcore/ieframe/shdocvw/hlframe.h
So what will be the installed user base when IE8 comes out? How many of those installation will immediately get the update? Are current trends an indicator of future ones?
If so, I'm not dancing--yet. I suppose this is (finally!) the beginning of getting out of the web development hell of having to develop for a broken browser, but it will be some time until we see some real lift from all this.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Actually I've been here a few years. Half the reason I posted that comment is just so that someone could reply with "you must be new here!" and get the +5 funny karma (however little that may be).
:/
Oh, you posted AC. I'm sorry.
True but you can limit the amount of crap code by enforcing standards!
:)
Clearly you've never worked on a sizeable project with coding standards.
Crappy coders just get more creative with their crapulence, or unintentionally devise ways to follow the letter of the standard while pouring metaphorical sugar in your gas tank. I've never seen a project where enforcing standards actually reduced crap -- it just changed the flavor of the crap.
That depends on when IE8 is released. It took them 1.75 years to get from announcing IE7 (Feb 2005) to releasing it (Nov 2006). Presumably they've been working on IE8 for a while, but if it takes them another 21 months, we're looking at fall 2009. Who knows what the Windows install base will look like then?
Personally, I'm hoping it'll be out by the end of 2008, though my current goal is to get people the hell off of IE6. Upgrade to IE7, switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari, whatever, just ditch that aging monstrosity of a browser if you possibly can (and aren't barred by your IT department, or a need to access some critical site that only works in IE6).
Or a standards shill.. no wait.. people can actually want interoperability?
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
But I have hacked the IE8 code base. Here is the code they have added to pass ACID2: if (url.equals("http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top")) { draw("smileyFace"); }
Now I know what they mean by ACID test. Reading that Microsoft's IE passes the test makes me feel I've tested positive for ACID!
Very bad rendering of what, AC?
the acid test is not a standards compliance test... it's a test of how well browsers break on sites that DONT support standards. It's not a measure of standards support for the browser, but it is nice to have.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
So you would be the grammer-nazi in this situation, I guess?
if(URL=="http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top") {
// Draw("%Systempath%\KonquerorRenderedAcid2.png");
Draw("%Systempath%\KonquerorRenderedAcid2.bmp");
return;
}
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Hope.
For America.
Is anyone else having problems with the ACID2 page? It's not rendering correctly for me in either Opera 9.24 or Safari 3.0.4 Beta for Windows on my PC.
I'm fairly sure that they were both rendering correctly a few weeks ago.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Acid came out in, what, 1997? Only taken them 10 years to do a simple css test! Bravo Microsoft...
Now how about that Win 98 memory leak?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The point of the test was to prod browser developers into improving their products to better support the existing specifications. This would increase interoperability (because different browsers would treat these features the same way) and give web developers more tools that they could actually use in practice.
This has worked. Safari/WebKit fixed a bunch of bugs and added a bunch of features until it passed. Then Opera. Firefox will pass it soon: Gecko 1.9 will pass it (beta 1 did, beta 2 doesn't for some reason -- I expect they'll make sure that's fixed by the time 3.0 final is released). Various smaller browsers (iCab, Konqueror before they decided to re-merge KHTML with WebKit, etc.) did as well. Now internal builds of IE8 have the necessary improvements.
Agreed. If you're writing a new website you will not put in all the hacks to make it work with IE6 when IE8 finally becomes the expected norm. You'll just tell the IE6 users to upgrade. Meanwhile, the existing IE6 supporting sites will continue to support IE6 users until they get with the program.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is a great step in the right direction. Maybe one day in the future I will end my 5+ year boycott of Internet Explorer! Probably not... but it will still be healthy for the web.
It's worth pointing out that this announcement is in direct contrast to IE7 announcements. Microsoft employees claimed IE7 not complying with ACID2 was a "design choice" rather than a bug. Wow... what a pathetic way to say "we don't care about web standards."
This is the way IE7 *should* have been. They're continuing support of "past evolving web standards" -- also known as Microsoft's proprietary standards -- while adding current (and hopefully future) standard support. This will enable web developers to be able to create less hacky pages using simpler CSS+HTML code rather than supporting only a subset of browsers.
+5 points for MS supporting healthy open web standards
-10 points for being about a decade late
It's a feature, Not a bug! http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/24/560095.aspx
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Uh didn't anyone get the memo with IE7 and how it works with quirks mode/correct mode? It's called a doctype, use it!
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
actually, firefox 3 does pass: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/acid/
I think it's the iframes failing due to the slashdot effect.
It may roll good against acid but what about vs. death magic?
To be fair, any page without a DOCTYPE is not compliant, and can't be rendered in a compliant way. Any page without a DOCTYPE is probably buggy in other ways too. Firefox has a quirks mode too, and tries to fix buggy pages. It identifies a buggy page the same way, by looking at the DOCTYPE.
Everybody is in a pickle when it comes to rendering broken HTML. The only solutions are to do the best you can, or display an error message rather than a page. Also, to be fair, most of this mess is indeed caused by Microsoft, but even they can't fix it in a day.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Sharepoint won't work...
No, you need "Enhanced mode" which is mo' better and of course breaks like the POS versions we are saddled with now.
maybe I am just too cynical
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I noticed the same error on Konqueror 3.5.8, Opera 9.5a, & Firefox 3 on Linux, and on Opera 9.24 and Safari 3.04 on Windows -- all of which are supposed to pass the test.
Earlier today I tried to pull up the webstandards.org website, and couldn't. This got me thinking it might be a server problem.
I looked at the code for the test, and at one point it has an OBJECT where it tries to load the url, http://www.webstandards.org/404/. That should fail, causing the browser to display the fallback content inside the OBJECT element instead.
Guess what? That URL is returning a 200 OK code instead of 404 Not Found, so the compliant browsers are doing what they're supposed to do and displaying the content of that page in a little rectangle with scroll bars, and hiding the fallback content that we would normally see.
When their webmaster fixes the server config, the various compliant browsers should start displaying it correctly again.
I used to have a script that would download an unofficial nightly build of Firefox every morning when I logged in. A lot of the "unofficial" nightly builds will use up and coming features like newer Gecko engines, and have some non-standard optimizations turned on.
Look around here, and you should be able to find a frequently updated nightly build that uses Gecko 1.9. If you update frequently you'll definitely want to keep a backup of the last "good" install.
That being said: Konqueror! FTW!
Maybe not
I think it's a server error, since the exact same problem occurs on supposedly-compliant versions ofFirefox, Opera and Safari. More in this comment.
It looks like a server error, since all Acid2-compliant browsers seem to be rendering it with the same exact error. More in this comment.
informative? soso. If I had some mod points left I'd give it an insightful WRT the last paragraph, just my 2 cent
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Again, suck it up and just promise to follow the rules of the community, and we might actually start to respect you a bit more.
Like hell.
*I* will never respect them. It's painfully obvious they've had the resources to do this for years, and for years they chose to treat the entire process with blatant contempt. It probably has cost me literally thousands of hours of my life to deal with their shit and I'm angry enough about it that I doubt I'd be above literally torturing their product managers if I had the chance. Put together the collective web dev time they've wasted with their little games, and you probably have hundreds of human lifetimes washed down the drain. They are on the same moral level of spammers, and that's the amount of respect they deserve.
And they'd do it *again* in a second if they thought it would earn them an advantage. They don't give a flying fig newton for you, for standards, for progress, for anything other than their own marketshare and control. The depth of contempt they deserve hasn't begun to be plumbed even here on slashdot.
ACID test? Great. This is essentially the abusive spouse buying roses for the woman who's just about finally fed up and ready to leave. Promises of good behavior while the fallout from IE 6 and 7 will be lingering for years to come.
Respect. Yeah.
Tweet, tweet.
I would say that it is extremely unreasonable to expect Microsoft to port Internet Explorer to other Operating Systems. They obviously did not write the program using an abstraction layer capable of running on multiple Operating Systems.
While we're on the subject of Firefox, whose bright idea was it to solve the memory leaks in 2.0.0.8 or so by making 2.0.0.11 use more and more processor time instead of more memory? Seriously, it's easy enough to kill a 200 MB Firefox instance and reopen the browser, but this 97% processor usage is just a pain in the ass. Infinite loops are not progress. I don't have to worry about that particular problem in any version of IE I've ever seen from 3.0 to 7.0 inclusive.IE solves the problem of caching pages by caching to the hard drive extensively. Firefox decided to use memory instead of the hard drive. There are advantages and disadvantages to both solutions. Using memory requires that the algorithm that determines the amount of memory used is very well written to keep other applications responsive. Using the hard drive is slow and puts strain on the hard drive. The only right answer here is to have the user decide what they want to use, but that means the user has to decide something that requires actual knowledge. Lets be real Users will never have actual knowledge :P
To restate you: never underestimate how hard lazy programmers will work to not work very hard.
blah blah blah
Does it render web pages correctly only when switched from the default mode to a "standards mode"? If so, then in practice its quality in "standards mode" is irrelevant because web developers will still have to make their sites incompatible with standards since 99% of Joe Blows are not going to be in "standards mode" and every web developer knows it. In other words, in reality, IE's disruption of the internet will only be perpetuated.
"True but you can limit the amount of crap code by enforcing standards!"
Of course, you're assuming the standards aren't themselves crap. Most members of standards committees don't have a lot of time to do stuff like designing and programming real applications. You can think of them as very bright people who wrote serious code a decade or more ago.
...mass hysteria!
I'm going to need the definition of interoperability that includes breaking huge amounts of existing pages.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Will they properly support: display: table
That single piece of CSS will end the whole "3 column problem" , or even "7 column problem" for that matter. Yes, you could do it with standard html tables, but it isn't nearly as powerful and it is bad form. (To get an idea what I mean with not nearly as powerful, consider that CSS can be dependant on the display media, such as printouts. )
All the popular browsers do that. If the author of the web page goes through the trouble of specifying a correct doctype, the browser will follow the standards. If the doctype is missing or incorrect the browser gives up and tries its best. By default Opera uses the doctype to choose quirks or standards mode just like all the rest, but it is the only one I know of that lets the user force standards or quirks mode.
See here for how Opera does it. Here for Firefox. Here for some old info on Konqueror. And here for more general info.
Maybe not
Maybe it sounds like a troll, but I'm serious: I think it makes more sense for them to build a Gecko wrapper than to try and fix the world's least compliant rendering engine. If you think this is a ridiculous proposal, note that Apple took this tack for Safari: they built their own UI on top of the existing KHTML rendering engine. And web developers were quite happy that they didn't have to target yet another browser.
As far as I'm concerned, rendering engines are becoming like networking libraries at this point: you choose one from the many high-quality free implementations that are already out there, and you build something cool with it. This is what Microsoft did with their TCP/IP stack. IE8 would likely be a much better browser if they redirected their rendering engine efforts into the UI.
Cheers.
Wooo... an editor. Way to go. Something that NO ONE can bypass by using an alternate editor. That will fix the problem. You are absolutely correct.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
FF 3 passes the test. (I downloaded it just to see that, a while back.)
:-)
And it's virtually certain that FF3 will be out before IE8.
In other news, the FIRST major browser to pass the test was Safari, and I just tried it--it no longer passes! WTF, WebKit doodz.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
they've spent a long time developing their bad reputation, why let them down?
Wow, it is amazing what a little complaint by a tiny browser company to the EU can do. I hope this is true.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Modes are decided by the web page's developer, not the user. It depends on which declaration you use. Even Firefox works that way.
Because IE's rendering engine is NOT just used by web browsers, but (like Gecko can, too) it is also used in hundreds of applications that you'd never guess, to render anything from reports to design surfaces for dev tools. Give up on it, you break the API for hundreds of tools, APIs, and others that depend on it (and want to continue upgrading without throwing away all their existing code).
That would piss off a LOT of people. Microsoft has their own development tool stack. They can give it up for now. Maybe in another decade.
So, IE8 passes acid2. Good.
Now, let's consider the real world.
My customers' websites show IE with a browser share of 50-70%. But, that is typically 50/50 IE6 and IE7.
So, how long will it take for IE8 to completely take over from 6 and 7?
By my guesstimate, about 2 years.
So, IE8 passes acid2, BFD. Wake me when 80+% of IE-using vistors use IE8.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
"box ticked"? Err? Have you ever heard of how doctype handling, quirkmode vs standardmode, etc works? Its been that way for like ever, and it has nothing to do with a "box being ticked". Its not like its the user that picks the rendering mode.
I see lots of comments slamming M$ while our beloved FireFox still can't pass the test. WTF??
For all we know the IE 8 pre-alpha is actually Safari Windows with a new skin. Until they release it, it only exists as hype.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
A good point, but can't they keep their developer IE API and still replace the desktop browser? Sorry to use Apple as an example again, but they have some kind of NSHTML rendering system that was (is?) used for their built-in help system. Of course it probably wouldn't render any HTML written since 1998, but it's there if someone wants to embed it. Or they can choose WebKit, like Safari does.
I don't believe Microsoft has to keep foisting this lousy browser on us year after year.
If I sound frustrated it is because in my web development work, it is almost always IE browsers (any version) that force the most awful hacking to get acceptable results. Basic coding usually works as expected in Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Safari.
Cheers.
Nice retort. Way to dodge the issue entirely by whining. Life is so unfair when people are logical isn't it?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
It doesn't require a Strict doctype: http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch/table.html for a chart.
a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad.
Assuming you run Firefox, check out the HTML Validator extension, which appears to do exactly what you want.
If only it came standard! =)
Firefox has Standards Mode, too (right-click anywhere on a page->View Page Info). It differentiates between "Quirks" mode and Standards-compliance mode. "Quirks" mode is used when invalid markup is detected, or if there's no DOM declared; Standards-compliance mode simply means that the site is being displayed to spec, instead of being cleaned up by the browser's interpretation as to what way it should look. Standards-compliance mode, in theory, should always look the same on every browser (it's why standards *exist*), but as everyone who's done web design knows, that's not the case. That's not to say I support Microsoft, but as a web developer, I have to look forward to the day when most of the audience on the web can view my pages properly, without the need for time-consuming workarounds. In actuality, IE7 really has impacted me to an extent, since none of the old workarounds for IE6 work for it any more, and it still doesn't get things right. So I have to work around IE6, IE7, and any differences that those workarounds cause in browsers like Opera and Firefox who display it right the first time, which is a major headache and waste of time considering there's standards for these browsers to follow.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
If IE's not just a monopoly-reinforcement tool for other MS products, why can't we get it for Solaris, OS X, and AIX? Lots of other browser vendors with fewer resources support a much wider array of targets. It'd be great to see IE for Linux, too, but we know that's too much to ask.
IE was available for Solaris and HP-UX until version 5. No one bothered to use them primarily because these were hardly desktop environments. It just wasn't worth their time any longer.
The API is extremely commonly used, and is the "norm" in the MS dev world... its not "sometimes used". Its the -norm- for this kindda thing. You can't really stop updating it. And if they have a browser renderer, especially an Acid2 compliant one, well, why not?
And each browsers have their quirk really. If you simply do normal html documents, IE is hell on earth. If you do javascript intensive web applications, Safari 2 is the most annoying things ever. Some really hard to find bugs in there. If you try to make a browser history manager that can be controlled from server side (useful in AJAX apps), Opera can work with it on and off and back on and back off from versions to versions. It goes on, and firefox isn't perfect either. I think we're better off with the competition. Hell, I don't think Firefox would even exist if IE6 hadn't been.
Acid2 Test aside, didn't they claim that IE 7 would match or beat supporting standards of any existing browsers? And didn't they claim that all of IE 7's development would be on bug/security fixes and standard's compliance and not waste time on new features (yet oh look, they added tabbed browser, etc. etc.). I understand that they have a product to sell, but from my perspective Microsoft is more interested in marketing spin than the quality of the actual product, because let's face it, IE 7 only wins when compared with IE 6, which only won compared to Netscape 4. =P
Seems like a whole lot of too little too late. They've got the market for one reason and one reason only: it's bundled and updated with Windows. They don't deserve a single penny for delivering such a sorry product.
Of course, it doesn't matter, because I for one don't bother with IE workarounds anymore. Either their browser works, or it's broken. Up to them to fix it and stop costing web developers extra grief and costs. When they finally fix it, so it works, so what. Many of us are beyond caring about the crap they make.
No. I don't honestly think that. I do honestly think the blog post about a browser that's far from the light of day was made and publicized in direct response to that complaint, though. Remember, my post was in response to someone actually asking for an anti-MS spin, so it's deliberately anti-MS spin. Some of if sticks when thrown against the wall, though.
My Firefox right now is using 55MB, and it's Firefox 2.0.0.10 which has been open just a couple of minutes. This system is quietly downloading the Firefox 2.0.0.11 as I type this, and that's the browser version that my other XP Pro machine has. That's the one with the tight loop problem. This machine doesn't have the same set of extensions installed, so perhaps I'll find there's something to the problem there. In fact, my 2.0.0.8 memory issues could have been related as much to an extension as to the browser itself I guess.
Here's a list of the extensions I use for comparison:
Palette Grabber (only at work, normally disabled)
Mozilla Accessibility Extension (normally disabled)
Firebug (normally enabled)
DOM Inspector (normally enabled)
HTML Validator (normally enabled at work, normally disabled here at home)
YSlow (only installed at work, normally disabled there)
Sage (only at work, normally disabled)
Talkback (normally enabled)
Now 56MB, but almost no processor usage. 2.0.0.10 still grows, but not like 2.0.0.8 did. I'm hoping to isolate the 2.0.0.11 tight loop problem, but so far I've had no time to test so I've been using Opera, FF 3 beta 1, and IE instead of FF 2 on that system.
Standards vs. Quirks Mode depends on doctype settings in the HTML — not a browser setting. The same is true of Firefox and other browsers.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Very well, I apologize for the harsh reaction. Although it is unclear that it was publicized in response to the complaint given that it apparently passed *just now*. Presumably, if they were going to post it even without Opera's complaint...it would have been exactly now anyway.
I can't believe anyone would believe IE8 properly renders Acid2 without evidence. If this were Firefox we'd have nightlies, betas, and other code to verify and learn from, inspect, share, and modify because Firefox respects our software freedom. If this news were about Firefox I'd be able to verify this myself without signing an NDA or being part of an organization that has lost the biggest antitrust case in US history. And respecting my software freedom is worth being excited about.
Digital Citizen
They did it over a year ago. It's called "Internet Explorer 7".
It's the pages that are written for IE7 (or IE6 or ANY SPECIFIC BROWSER) that are broken and non-interoperable, not the browser. Why do you and so many others continue to think that websites should be made browser-specific and those who create them be allowed to hold browser authors hostage? Reading the responses to this story I feel as if I've fallen into some bizarro world where Microsoft's promotion of Microsoft-only websites has suddenly become embraced as a good thing. And when I point out how illogical this is, my posts get marked as Flamebait. I wonder how many of these posts advocating MS-specific web development can be traced back to the Redmond area; it's the only explanation I can fathom. Honestly--that's not flamebait, it's simply trying to figure out how all of you who oppose a single company ruling the entire internet have evaporated and been replaced by those who think it's a good thing. What is going on here???
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I agree none of the browsers are perfect -- it's just that each additional rendering engine takes away from the productivity of the web without adding much. There needs to be some competition, but honestly not as much as there has been. So it just seems like the best thing to do would be to drop the one that is the furthest off target. I maintain that the furthest off target is the IE branch. I'd be happy with KHTML and Gecko sharing nearly the whole market.
But of course it's all just talk. We'll get IE 8, and I'm just about positive that whether it renders Acid2 or not, it'll introduce a whole host of new issues, and since we'll still have to develop for IE6 and IE7, everyone will have another distinct rendering engine to target. Increase development costs by 10%. No associated benefits. Sigh.
Cheers.
Why does Microsoft keep bringing up this 'backwards compatibility" comment to justify their lack of standards support. If they would just develop a standards complaint browser then all these websites that run on Firefox, Safari, etc., should run just fine. If it's the problem of a site seeing IE8 and then running IE6 code hacks, then they could just rename the whole browser to something cool like Expanse 1.0 or something (going along with the "Vista" concept there). Surely they aren't saying that there are a bunch of sites compatible with only IE and nothing else? If such a thing does exist it needs to die and be rebuilt.
Yeah I agree we have something that was made to switch between windows, instead we use an inferior interface builtinto the browser. But I'm using tabs anyways, strange isn't it..
Think about it why should we use tabs, really?
Netscape started it!
I know it's dumb responding to a troll, but I will anyway.
NEWS FLASH! I've been around Slashdot longer than Jombeewoof, and my existance as a separate person can be independently verified.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I use Firefox ...
Basicaly, MDI (and tabs are a kind of MDI) UIs were invented for a reason, and have their use cases
And i find it irritating that many other applycations switched from MDI to SDI in the last years (eg: ms office, nero)
Things must have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years since I played around with software that generated code for you. All of my hand-written code starts with the right document type declaration and easily passes validation. However, I do get handed code that is automatically generated from time to time. I keep a program called Tidy around to strip all of the garbage out of it.
Props to Microsoft for offering some compatibility with standards. It might make my job a little easier.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Er... even worse than that... Opera 9.25 (latest stable) doesn't either!
I find this a really odd mistake for a standards organization to be making!
If I were to allow myself the luxury of a Tin hat, I'd believe Bizarro Land.
One of the Mozilla developers hosts the test, whereupon the Fox3b2 plays nicely.
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/evil/acid/002/#top
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It tests for borderline cases which shouldn't happen in practice, such as invalid CSS. Who cares if your browser doesn't respect the standard for invalid data? I know I don't, and you shouldn't.
I have a more pertinent question: why doesn't IE7 handle XHTML? It's been out for 8 years now!
Maybe MS operates with Non-Euclidian principles.
Would Hyperbolic Geometry explain everything? "Cairo is coming! Longhorn is coming! Compliance is coming!" Then their parallel lines veer off into the next galaxy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's because the acid2 webpage is broken. They updated it and it screws up now.
Directly opposite me there works a man who is tasked with making a web page on an embedded system run on any browser he can think of.
He has tested various versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and all versions of IE since 4 on various operating systems. He has also tested on a number of other devices - a Wii, an iPod Touch, an HTC Touch (Windows Mobile based smartphone) and a Nintendo DS.
He was delighted to discover that he had to make virtually no changes to his original design - it was reasonably standards based and all the browsers rendered it in a broadly similar fashion. Until, that is, he started using Microsoft browsers - particularly the smartphone based ones.
The obvious solution would be to render pages with a doctype declaration correctly, and render pages without one IE6-style.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
What MS actually means to say is "backward" compatibility (i.e. being compatible with earlier mishaps called 'IE' which introduced the very non-standards compliant ways of doing things). It's just that AutoFill keeps adding the "s"..
I think it's fantastic. First you break the standards because you like to screw up web standards and force a proprietary world on the Net, and then when that doesn't work you trumpet to all that you are now "fully compliant" as if you weren't the company that made this mess in the first place. Impressive.
Insert
More likely it will remove any incentive for them to do so, thus ensuring that a disturbingly large proportion of websites continues to be "optimised for Internet Explorer 5.5 or newer". Microsoft gets it both ways, they can claim standards compliance, while ensuring that their browser remains the standard for cowboy web designers.
They wanted to preserve rendering of "broken" pages hacked for IE6 and 7, while rendering standards-compliant pages correctly. This means that web developers that use a proper doctype will get something that renders the same in IE8 as it does in other browsers. Pages with tag soup targeted at IE6 are the most likely to have an incomplete (or no) doctype anyway.
Being able to force it to render things correctly is a good thing. Additionally, most other browsers (including Firefox and Opera) do essentially the same thing, deciding (Google cache because page had trouble loading for me) whether to use "standards mode", "quirks mode", or "almost standards mode" based entirely on the doctype.
This is the best way to preserve compatibility with pages targeted at IE6 (of which there are lots) while making life easier for web developers pissed at having to jump through hoops for IE (of which there are lots).
Never mistake "can" for "should".
The acid2 test on webstandards.org is currently broken. ( see Mozilla Bugzilla [ you might need to copy and paste that])
A reference to http://www.webstandards.org/404/ which must fail now returns 200.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
Am I the only one that noticed that?
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
If you read the blog posting, you would know that the html and xml files are for testing purposes
Ah, thanks. I did read the blog posting, but only up until the postscript. Oops!
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Opera sues MS mainly for Standards compliance just a week ago and this "We pass Acid test" story comes out.
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2007/12/13/
Too much for co-incidence. Also, it seems a billion dollar company who has more people to make coffee than Opera+Mozilla developers combined CAN produce a standards compliant browser down to Acid2 test. Why IE 8 and not IE 7? Why now?
For designers, it doesn't matter if they ripped off web-kit or even Gecko. As long as there's support for standards, coding a web interface becomes less of a hassle.
I'm not sure about that... Its easier to get IE users to upgrade to IE8, than it is to make them switch to Firefox. Less so today than 5 years ago, mind you, as Firefox is a fairly well known name now, even in the non-techie world, but... It hasn't been that long since IE7 came out, and I already find myself in situations where I can ignore IE6... if in the same timeframe I can start ignoring IE7, that will be an amazing productivity boost.
Mind you, thats not for ecommerce and other super-public web sites, but its a start.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
CONDCOMS.
Rubbing your pet puppy's nose in it is training. Doing it to a feral dog in front of its pack is suicide. There are an awful lot of MS thralls who make their living perpetually de-stinking MS's shit, and the ignorant are grateful for the arcane rituals. Why should anyone involved actually improve things? I mean, beside for self-respect.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I may be wrong, but the view I have of Microsoft is this: There's a lot of really cool and talented developers there who would like to do things like make IE better (and standards compliant) and be more friendly to things like open source. But there's a lot of management at MS that just won't allow it.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Have you not learned from the nightmare of continuing to support buggy legacy programs under Windows, like making sure that old programs that would free memory and then immediately access it still worked? As long as there are sites that require your compatibility mode instead of standards mode, users will have little reason to switch modes, and they'll be out there forever.
Paraphrasing: When that browser goes out it'll support a thousand mutations of the standard! Non-compliant pages will spread everywhere! We'll never be rid of them!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
If they keep including the support for old, poorly written IE only websites, then those websites will never change.. And moreso, people will keep coding to the old IE "standard" (if it can be called that) and nothing will improve..
Agreed that most HTML code generators are crap. But good ones do exist. And if you insist on hacking out every little bit of HTML yourself, you can forget about doing a web site of any size. Even if you could type fast enough, there wouldn't be room in your brain for all the structural information that you need to tie the bits of the web site together.
Nowadays, most of the web content I create starts out as FrameMaker files. (Yes, I know, FrameMaker is an evil program, but it has an obscene degree of lockin in the technical documentation world.) These get transformed to HTML files. I can't say I'm in love with the generated HTML, but it is compliant with HTML and CSS specs. And over the next year we're moving to structured FrameMaker, which maps directly to XML, which is easily transformed to XHTML via XSLT scripts. Highly tweakable XSLT scripts. This should give us web output far superior to anything we could get by hand-coding the HTML. Even assuming we had time to do that, which we don't.
I'll agree they were probably already working on passing Acid2. I'm not willing to assume they didn't finish up the last bit of work on it faster than they would have otherwise to create a marketing opportunity. Microsoft's main advantage as a software company has always been their effective marketing. If some other companies had the effective marketing department Microsoft has, most of us here might be running Crusoe-powered machines running OS/2 with our Opera browsers, sipping our Diet Ski and wearing Lee jeans. The merits of some of MS's software make it worthwhile for its own sake, but that's never been the case for Windows or IE AFAIAC.
Why? If we do, our enterprise-wide custom-programmed Online Timesheet application will cease to function. It's a custom Java app, running on top of something from PeopleSoft and apparently using some obscure IE6 "feature". No, I'm not from IT, I can't tell you which feature. All I know is, that's the official explanation from the IT department for staying with IE6, essentially forever.
Proof? One frustrated tech-savvy colleague installed IE7, and lost all access to his timesheet. Of course, you cannot back-install to IE6, so he's trapped.
But here's the larger irony. That timesheet app works perfectly in Opera's default install. And keeps working through Opera upgrades.
So the said colleague has installed Opera (against corporate policy, which is Microsoft exclusively) to regain access to his timesheet.
Sigh... at least our IT department uses other means to keep us secure from all the nasties which could exploit IE6. But I sure miss those tabs...
In the good old days, my grandfather tells me, if an apprentice failed to do something right, he would be forced to do it all over again.
I feel that this kind of apprenticeship has -- quite undeservedly -- gone out of style among web designers.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Where are you coming from? This is from the about page:
While true that it does not test the entire standard and it is not meant as such, it does test certain parts of the standards (or proposed standards) and how well the browsers support them, not how well they break on sites that aren't standards compliant.
From the slashdot summary I was thinking Microsoft turned over a new leaf and was going to support the standards better than any other browser out there. While the fact that they can pass ACID2 is great, I find it intensely disturbing that the page is peppered with anti-standards language.
For one, you apparently have to put IE8 into a "standards mode". Basically no one that will be using IE8 will ever see this experience since the only people that would probably bother to put it into standards mode are web developers. Therefore you will have the same complaints you always had, 'the page doesn't look right' and you can't force your customers to switch to standards mode because their MSN home page won't look right.
So this doesn't really mean anything, we just did it for fun...
Standards are confusing, we cannot support them all. It's too confusing for the user to even think about so just use IE8 and when we don't support standards it is because there are too many... 'de facto' standards are things that WE make work in IE becaue most of the web users use IE so whatever we do is by definition standards compliant...
CSS 2.1 isn't "finalized" so why bother planning on supporting a proposed standard. The IMG tag is there because of 'embrace and extend' just like Microsoft is famous for (this was actually from when 'html' wasn't a standard yet in 1993, the first HTML RFC was in November 1995). Oh yeah, "opinions" must matter in standards...
So 'lookie here at this standards compliance test we passed' while they completely ignore it to keep from "breaking the existing web".
Sorry for this rant. I basically was excited to have IE actually render pages how they should look. I expected the article to say "We are excited to be making IE8 the most standards compliance browser because standards are important and we will be focusing on them". Most of the language though is hemming and hawing on standards, it's a very unclear message.
> If it's the problem of a site seeing IE8 and then running IE6 code hacks, then they could
> just rename the whole browser to something cool like Expanse 1.0 or something
I wonder about this too. If IE8's interoperable rendering is as much better as they indicate, wouldn't it be an opportune time to (finally) update the user-agent string? IE has been spoofing Mozilla for pretty much its entire history, but is that really still desirable? In the early days spoofing Mozilla meant you got the "enhanced" content intended for Netscape browsers (with, you know, cool colors and stuff). Later other browsers started to spoof the "IE spoofing Mozilla" combination, because that typically meant you got the spiffy DHTML content intended for IE5. Now most other browsers have largely _quit_ doing that, so they can get the more standards-compliant content (and here I'm using the term loosely; said content is seldom fully compliant) typically intended for Firefox. If I were the IE8 team, I'd be taking the opportunity now to update the User-Agent string.
Given that naive sniffing code typically just does a substring check, usually for "IE" and sometimes the version number, the obvious thing is to remove the string "IE" from the UA string. If it were me, I'd make it something along these lines...
Internet Explorer/8.0 (Win32; Windows NT 6.0; en-US)
Rebranded versions (notably, MSN Explorer) could throw whatever vendor indicator they like on the end of that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I might not like IE (any version), but at least Microsoft did a really neat move when they added their IE conditional comments. It keeps the code valid, other browsers ignore them because they're valid comments, and it allows us to target specific versions of IE.
So, while Microsoft does have problems with IE, at least they gave us a clean and solid way of making special code for it, especially given the "cascading" in CSS.
I personally feel that it is time to let IE break clean with the IE7 and older versions' flaws. MS should create a compliant browser for a change and if people want to access the deliberately kludged sites let them use IE7 or earlier. It's time to let the spaghetti code that is IE7 die its unnatural death. Sorry to be so blunt but this sounds like the same excuses coming from Microsoft when IE7 was nearing release. There was a backing away from standards because they reasoned that they would rather put out a known flawed product rather than attempt to do it right and making "new" mistakes. Come on. Frankly it sounded like upper management BS "dumbed down" so that maybe we the developers might swallow this dubious reasoning when actually management is saying we don't want to spend the money to do it correctly. The IE team management has little credibility as far as I'm concerned. "Let them eat cake!" indeed.
Be as you would have the world become.