Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes

Dak RIT writes "In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."

Comments

Wait a second?

[jawtheshark]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant? That's insane.... Those that fuck up compliancy should be punished. Heck, no, if I specify XHTML strict, it should render strict. The doctype does say enough. Those who want to adhere to standards just say "strict" and that's it. We do not need an additional tag. The doctype is not broken as he says in the article. You fuckers broke it!

IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change.

There you have it... It wasn't rendering accurately... Who's at fault, eh?

He's simply not realising that adding another tag will have the same effect as the doctype... And in 5 years will have a 4th rendering mode. Great! Long live standards, those that I can choose!

This is a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards compatibility. The standards are open and published, adhere to them.

Re:Wait a second?

[morgan_greywolf]

This is a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards compatibility. The standards are open and published, adhere to them. Come meet the new Microsoft. Same as the old Microsoft.

You really expected true standards compliance? I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell you!

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did call it the "Quirks Mode" right? Its their Quirk!

Re:Wait a second?

[spyowl]

Exactly. Microsoft picks and chooses how they treat standards, and that hasn't changed with upcoming IE8. Consider the quote below from the MSDN blog:

In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way. Because sites expected IE6 behavior, the DOCTYPE switch failed to protect compatibility in the real world when we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant.

So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards and set the proper expectations with their developers and their customers; and then faked the standards mode for their own benefit to be backward compatible to the broken rendering mode they had before. Nice twist to the truth though - would have probably made it through some junior VB script kiddies if it was more sugar coded.

Re:Wait a second?

[WaHooCrazy7]

As a web developer I hate it when it comes to making things work in IE. This is just one of my many issues with microsoft (which is why I use linux boxes). But even for the rendering engine of IE 6, which i've had break with simple HTML once, the HTML 4 standard has been out for how long now? Would it really kill them to make it standards compliant like say opera or fire fox? Same goes for CSS. I wonder when HTML 5 is released how long will it take microsoft to become "compliant" with that in their own terms? Not that it really matters since everyone will just write special IE code anyway...

Re:Wait a second?

[Tumbleweed]

Hey, don't forget that when IE8 comes out, it'll only be 'mostly' compliant, so when IE9 comes out, we'll have to add another tag that says 'really-REALLY complaint, this time we really mean it' meta tag.

So can super high-traffic sites measure the amount of bandwidth they have to pay to use to send out this unnecessary tag to millions of people and bill MS for it? Oh, I forgot, their EULA says they're not responsible for their products. :)

Re:Wait a second?

[andr0meda]

So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards

Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?

Anyway. Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.

Re:Wait a second?

[Kjella]

Would you prefer it that they skipped the W3C doctypes entirely since they're not compliant anyway, and just called the standard "ie8" which is whatever IE renders? IE is like most software not bugfree, and it's unrealistic to expect every webpage around the world to get checked and fixed every time they fix a bug, and it's equally unrealistic to expect every page to follow the standard if there's a good chance it can be made to look right in IE. Honestly, they should have simply made a compatibility tag from the start which basicly means "render like IE4/5/6/7/8/latest, DON'T apply any later bugfixes because we've worked around them". Then everyone that gets their panties in a knot can set it to "latest" and leave it there which shouldn't break anything if it's compliant in the first place, while sites that for some reason can't/won't/don't follow standards can pick an IE version and stick with it without risking their site suddenly getting corrupt because MS issued a bugfix. To fix a site, you would change both the code and the compatibility tag at the same time. Yes, the "latest" should have been implicit but as it is, pages with no tags at all is rendered in the most quirky quirks mode possible, and that can't be changed now.

Re:Wait a second?

[random0xff]

It's pretty simple really, Microsoft is built on backwards compatibility. Saying that those who are not standards compliant should be punished by IE will NOT be heard by Microsoft. It's not just that they don't agree, they don't BELIEVE that it should be that way. They feel this (misplaced?) sense of responsibility not to break the web. Nothing we say (on the IE blog or here) will change that way of thinking.

Anyway, Microsoft can scratch ACID 2 rendering now, since it will only render in IE 8 with the new meta tag (which should point out to the IE team the error of their ways).

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant?

No, actually you'll be adding a tag that says "This page displays properly on IE7, Firefox 2, and some other browsers I tested it with" and it'll be up to the browser to figure out how to be compliant with you. In IE's case, IE8 will see that and say "I'd better render this page like IE7 does, because it probably has IE-specific workarounds that'll render incorrectly in IE8's really-standard-compliant rendering."

When you're good and ready, and you see enough IE8 hits in your access log to make it worthwhile, you can get IE8, test your pages, and if they look good, you can update the tag. It'll be under your control when users start to see the new rendering engine in IE8; you won't have to worry about when your users decide to upgrade themselves.

This approach has some great benefits; the IE team actually can safely break compatibility with IE6 and IE7 specific websites and implement standards correctly, because those websites will continue to be rendered with the existing renderer until they explicitly say it's safe to render with IE8's renderer. If they do this well, all we web developers will need to do is remove any IE-specific workarounds if the browser is not IE6/7... IE8 will be treated like any other standards-compliant browser, with no special coding or styling.

Another great benefit for us developers is that we'll be able to change the new tag to get an IE7 rendering from IE8... no more virtual machines just to have different versions of IE on the system. (Except for IE6, but Microsoft is supposedly going to try to force most IE6 users to IE7 next month.)

I can't tell you how much time I've wasted over the past few years trying to get standards compliant pages to look right in IE6 and IE7. I'll be very happy to be able to have my Apache server insert a response header that says "This page is for IE7; deal with it" and not have to worry that my application is going to break when people start to upgrade to IE8 in-between my releases.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

And in 5 years will have a 4th rendering mode.

This is a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards compatibility You can boot 64 bit windows, run a 16 or 32 bit Windows API app, open a shell window and run a 16 bit DOS app. IE 8 will render everything relevant to 99% or the world including everything designed for IE 6, 7 and 8. IE 9 will introduce another mode, yes, but it will also, in turn, correctly render everything.

'Misguided' backward compatibility has always dominated Microsoft products. It works very well for them and their customers appreciate it. Stew in your 'standards' fury while they collect billions. Enjoy!

Re:Wait a second?

[cp.tar]

So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards

Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?

Anyway. Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.

Or leave it broken for the people without a proper browser.

If it's strict, it's strict. If your browser cannot render strict properly, go and bitch to the manufacturer.

Re:Wait a second?

[SanityInAnarchy]

IE is like most software not bugfree,

And that is not an excuse.

Firefox is not bugfree -- it leaks like a sieve (or "fragments"), chewing up half your RAM. Konqueror is not bugfree -- it crashes maybe every day or two for me. I'm sure Safari and Opera each have their own bugs.

But I can relatively easily make a website -- even a web app -- which works the same way in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, and so on. This is the first 90% of the project. The other 90% is making it work on IE.

it's unrealistic to expect every webpage around the world to get checked and fixed every time they fix a bug, and it's equally unrealistic to expect every page to follow the standard if there's a good chance it can be made to look right in IE.

Why is it unrealistic to ask people to follow the standard, and to let IE be buggy? Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?

Honestly, they should have simply made a compatibility tag from the start which basicly means "render like IE4/5/6/7/8/latest, DON'T apply any later bugfixes because we've worked around them".

Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5?

Re:Wait a second?

[das_magpie]

Good on you, I agree totally, these morons really aught to try to make a browser that works with current standards first.

I just hope the world won't play along with crap and stick to already working standards when building web.

Re:Wait a second?

[Sancho]

Obviously, and this is the manufacturer's solution.

I don't really know what people want from Microsoft now. They screwed up--it's obvious. They know it, we know it, web developers know it. Nevertheless, web developers have had to work around incompatibilities for years. What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people? Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site? It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?

Re:Wait a second?

[dmsuperman]

That's absolutely asinine. Just because Microsoft screwed up by not making their browser standards compliant, doesn't mean you should punish a majority of the users of it's browser. A lot of people haven't even heard of other browsers that are better, so why should they be punished?

Meh, it's your loss. When you have fewer customers because only a certain percentage of them can view your website, you'll realize that your OMGWTFBLAMEEVERYONE attitude was truly the one at fault, not MS.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am as much of an IE hater as anyone. It has been crippling the web for years. However, what they are doing is necessary to ensure adoption of IE8 and advance the web.

Let's face it, the people dumb enough to be using IE are not the first to be updating. If MS releases a browser that broke sites of say an corporate intraweb site, the sysadmins will not update it, and IE6 will be with us forever.

This is the reason IE7 is still low in market share! A recent polling of my sites indicated 60% percent of IE users are still using IE6. I hate IE6 and do not want to support it anymore, so if this will rid the earth of IE6 then fine.

Re:Wait a second?

[devjj]

++

We really shouldn't be buying into this nonsense. Any developer who goes along with it is implicitly saying that he or she is willing to add extraneous tags to every single page he or she builds until the end of time. In placing said tag on your page you are telling Microsoft that it has the right to dictate how you code your pages; that standards alone are not enough. We should not reward this behavior.

Now, if Microsoft wants to make the new renderer the default (assuming it actually does render the way most modern browsers do, relatively speaking), and you can add a tag to get the old functionality -- I'd be fine with that. Just don't make me fuck with otherwise perfect markup because you guys did such a shitty job implementing things the first seven times.

Re:Wait a second?

[er3s]

Wow, does it hurt to be this perfect? If you have an existing site that has hundreds of pages, do you want it all to BREAK once users are FORCED to download IE8?

Also, you want to make sure it still works, with the current "broken standards" but when you start to convert over. So you can tell the browser, "Hey this page is standards compliant, so render it correctly". Take a bank site or example, I'm sure you'd be "fucking" pissed if your bill wasn't paid correctly or was underpaid due to an error in some validation.

They are trying to give people help in converting instead of breaking sites to keep a few happy. Maybe you could offer a free video series on how to make standards compliant CSS2?

Microsoft can never win no matter what they do. They try to give you an option to avoid "fucking" it up, and you whine.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, fuckoff ...

Re:Wait a second?

[Max Threshold]

The point is, why should you have to do any of this crap in the first place? You should not do any extra work to make compliant pages render correctly in a broken browser. Screw letting a convicted illegal monopolist create extra work for you just so they can maintain their market share. At most, you should put a note on the page that explains why it might not look right, and why people should download a compliant browser.

Re:Wait a second?

[Bafoon]

the only people who don't actually seem to get the point of different rendering modes are: -kids -firefox kids -unemployed jackasses -employed people who actually don't realise how much of a pain it would be for web developers to keep web pages working in all browsers every year...with every new version. the aproach of just "fixing" rendering...telling everybody to go f. themselves and fix the webpages so they render in the new engine is an approach only firefox and other browsers with a small % of users can do. Firefox has a rebel comunity which actually spends more time browsing porn sites and blogs than actually making web pages. So they are quite happy to upgrade to a new version every bloody day. Internet Explorer however is used in large companies(i don't suppose you actually noticed that ie is the only browser that can have group policy applied to it and keep every user in the network under control?),and has largest % of internet users. Then let's not forget the fact that windows is not free.Don't for a second forget the millions of dollars companies throw at microsoft every year to keep their companies running on their software. The moment microsoft would try to go with the "rebel approach" and just create a new rendering engine announcing on microsoft.com :"fix your webpages...or f. off"...sites would crash,software made to run in a browser could stop working(every seen one of those CRM or god forbid...payment systems used by real stores made in html and ajax?...). All those crappy pages would break...developers would quit their jobs after a week of angry customers who's webpages got finished years ago...just so some freaking firefox kid would be happy about compliance he doesn't even know squat about. Not to mention he doesn't even know almost no browser fully supports any of those standards.He probably doesn't even realise that 99% of the webpages he visits daily spit on wc3 or any other standard.Yet he expects the browsers to fully support every standard so that HE can make his silly "hello my name is Joe" page. Get a clue. The only thing you should be praying for is a mode in ie8 or ie10 that comes as close as possible to rendering a webpage according to specifications AND still keeps other rendering modes in there for the sake of backwards compatibility. Something small time web browsers don't have to worry about.

Re:Wait a second?

[JackHoffman]

Another great benefit for us developers is that we'll be able to change the new tag to get an IE7 rendering from IE8

Seriously, you're new to this, aren't you? Not only will you have to test your page with browsers running in virtual machines, over the course of time you'll have to test it in IE8 pretending to be IE7, IE8 pretending to be IE6, IE9 pretending to be IE8, IE9 pretending to be IE7, and so on as you change the tag to benefit from newer rendering modes. All those render modes will either use combined code, which means they won't render exactly as the old versions, or they are essentially multiple browsers in one, which means they'll each have their own security vulnerabilities and plugin incompatibilities.

This page is for IE7; deal with it

Added benefit for Microsoft: They get to write their own standards again. If another browser sees that made-for-IE7 tag, it must recreate all of IE7's quirks (and those of IE6 and IE8 and IE9...), i.e. behave like some closed source software from Microsoft. MS DOC deja vu...

I really hope that the other browser developers show MS the finger on this one, because if you thought browsers are memory hogs and security nightmares now, wait until every browser has to implement all its predecessors' quirks and all its predecessors' competitions' quirks.

Re:Wait a second?

[cp.tar]

That's absolutely asinine. Just because Microsoft screwed up by not making their browser standards compliant, doesn't mean you should punish a majority of the users of it's browser. A lot of people haven't even heard of other browsers that are better, so why should they be punished?

No. They should be educated.
Inform them they are using a non-compliant browser and send them to download Firefox.

And if they insist on using a deficient product, it is not my problem.

Meh, it's your loss. When you have fewer customers because only a certain percentage of them can view your website, you'll realize that your OMGWTFBLAMEEVERYONE attitude was truly the one at fault, not MS.

I am an educator.

Every user I educate is a win for me.
And for everybody else, in the end.

Re:Wait a second?

[devjj]

YOU are asinine.

The purpose of a standard is to define what should occur for a given set of inputs. Do you have any idea what would happen to the web as a whole if TCP/IP was implemented the same way Microsoft approached CSS? We have standards for a reason, and Microsoft systematically implemented their renderer improperly so as to ensure that their definition of the standard would be what people coded. Microsoft didn't want to cede authority to the W3C on this topic, they played dirty, and yet again ended up with a monopoly that has served no one but them.

Re:Wait a second?

[Arthur Grumbine]

This is the first 90% of the project. The other 90% is making it work on IE. I guess giving 110% just isn't enough for you...

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Things should be the other way around. Standard compliant should be the _default_ mode and force any non-compliant website to add more tags so their site is wrongly rendered like IE 4.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, asshole, show me exactly which part of the proposal breaks _any_ standard? And look how many people complained when the more standards compliant (than IE6, at leat) IE7 was released.

But your childish opposition to de-facto standards is quaint, you fucking dipshit.

Re:Wait a second?

[peragrin]

wait for IE 10 to become complaint with HTML 5

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

two 90%? why not make each 50%?

Re:Wait a second?

[Jesus_666]

They could make the new better-strict rendering mode the default for proper any (X)HTML version that only gets supported after IE7. You know, show people that you actually care about standards instead of putting in a stopgap measure and declaring that it's good for eternity.

Re:Wait a second?

[SanityInAnarchy]

What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people?

Yes. To anyone this affects: Your website was broken in the first place. It is partly MS' fault that it was broken, but mostly yours, for not trying it out with other browsers.

Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site?

Yes. Let them add hacks like <use-fucked-up-block-model>. Don't make the standards compliant people have to add <dont-fuck-up-my-box-model/>.

(Yes, I realize it's an HTTP header. You think that makes it better? I mean, yeah, great -- now "save as" on webpages will break them, unless they're using <http-equiv>. And yes, it's got a browser version number in there!)

It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?

I wouldn't. I'd much rather have a little short-term inconvenience, if it means that in the long term, we can forget about all this. Maybe even forgive.

But no, we got the opposite -- something that works in the short term, but will come back to haunt us in the long term. I'm really not looking forward to the <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag with IE9 in another few years. Nor am I looking forward to IE15 unintentionally introducing a bug in the IE6 compatibility, breaking some decade-old site out of the blue -- I'd much rather it be broken now, when there's a greater chance someone's actually paying attention enough to fix it.

Re:Wait a second?

[realthing02]

Microsoft's Non-compliance probably keeps half the complainers here employed. Not saying it's right (or wrong) just saying it.

Re:Wait a second?

[diegocgteleline.es]

I'll be very happy to be able to have my Apache server insert a response header that says "This page is for IE7; deal with it" and not have to worry that my application is going to break when people start to upgrade to IE8 in-between my releases.

Well...you are happy, I'm not. I'm sick of having to implement different pages for different browser. The IE 8 proposal only exacerbates this problem to the extreme. Yes, it'll be very easy to add a "it works in ie8" tag...except that you need to support SEVERAL browsers, at least firefox and safari. You'll need to implement another TWO implementations of your page...or let firefox/safari to use the ie7 mode.

This crap leaves firefox in a very "interesting" place: Either they implement this thing - and hence firefox tries to imitate IE8's behaviour, because many pages are going to be designed ONLY for IE and firefox will need to display them correctly.....or they don't implement it and firefox gets feed IE7-compatible code, or needs to support both IE7 + IE8 pages.

Re:Wait a second?

[Tumbleweed]

wait for IE 10 to become complaint with HTML 5

I'm still waiting for IE7 to become compliant with HTMl 4.01. *sigh*

Re:Wait a second?

[beav007]

Because in the web design world, that's not how it works. You spend 90% of your time making the website. It then takes another 90% to make it render properly in IE without breaking it in more standards compliant browsers, thus causing you take 80% more time to create the site than it should have.

It's just like any other project in the software world. The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the time.

Re:Wait a second?

[JackHoffman]

First, instead of pretending that this is a doctype problem, own up the mistake and explain that IE6 created the problem which needs to be fixed.

The only actual problem is that many IE6-only pages exist which declare a wrong doctype. A solution to that does not need to be extended into a mechanism which makes it a standard compliant behaviour to design to specific browsers and browser versions. The proposed solution puts Microsoft in the position where they can continue to disregard standards, because as long as the document declares for which browser it is written, every other browser has to cope, should this become a standard.

In conclusion, Microsoft could either provide a new browser which faces the same problems as every other browser, i.e. not being recognized as IE and therefore being excluded from certain pages and web applications, alongside a compatibility browser which emulates IE6 for those legacy applications. Or Microsoft could simply push for a new version of HTML, complete with a new doctype, which a new browser version would then render accurately while treating older doctypes like IE7 or IE6 does today. The only thing they really need is a way of saying "this is a new page, no quirks mode, for real" and a new HTML doctype would do that just fine.

What they propose is the same compatibility scheme which has failed miserably in Word: Each version of Word creates its own "standard" of the DOC file format and every successive version has to render all versions of that format. Even Microsoft, despite having the code to the older Word versions, doesn't get that right. Competitors don't even stand a chance because there is no specification and no code to look at. Do you really want that for the web? That kind of mess is exactly why standards and accompanying standards replaced the proprietary Netscape vs. Microsoft tag soup.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

We will support standards so long as they are not standard. -M$

Re:Wait a second?

[Bazer]

I think Microsoft expects that if they announce a change to strict standards compliance in IE8 by default, then they would immediately start losing market share to other browsers. Browser which have strict standards compliance _now_ and can be used by web developers for testing right now.

PS.(OT) If they were able to get away with an "inconvenience" such as Vista (DRM, cutting of XP etc.) then they can get away with forcing strict standards compliance in IE8.

Re:Wait a second?

[nmb3000]

You really expected true standards compliance? I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell you!

Oh come on. You and the OP should take a second and THINK before running your collective mouths off.

There is nothing wrong with using a special (standards compliant) tag to tell the browser to render differently than normal. In addition to preventing tens of thousands of websites from breaking, there are plenty of CDs and other media containing websites written over the last 10 years. Should all these become unusable just because Microsoft updated their browser? Is adding one tag really that much trouble for you?

I know it's fashionable on Slashdot to say things like "NOT STANDARDS COMPLIANT!?! HOW DARE THEY!!1" (and then get modded up for it!), however the real world requires more tact than that. Coming up with a solution like this that unifies the three Trident rendering modes (quirks, IE6, standard) is pretty elegant. It keeps real old sites from breaking. It keeps sites made in the last 7 years from breaking. Above all, it gives web authors the ability to fine-tune the way their page renders without a bunch of hacks.

Is it ideal? Obviously not, but unless you've got a time machine and can fix the problem, please shut up. Bitching about the past doesn't do anything except give people headaches. It's worth wondering if Microsoft's dedication to backwards-compatibility has anything to do with their success. It's popular around here to say "get with the times" but in the business world, that means money. The supposed "bit rot" is an artificial and man-made result of ignoring this fact.

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

Seriously, you're new to this, aren't you?

Eleven years and running, almost as long as the tubes have had webpages running through them. Do I still count as new if I'm not crusty yet?

Not only will you have to test your page with browsers running in virtual machines, over the course of time you'll have to test it in IE8 pretending to be IE7, IE8 pretending to be IE6, IE9 pretending to be IE8, IE9 pretending to be IE7, and so on as you change the tag to benefit from newer rendering modes. All those render modes will either use combined code, which means they won't render exactly as the old versions, or they are essentially multiple browsers in one, which means they'll each have their own security vulnerabilities and plugin incompatibilities.

Seriously, you're not a software engineer, are you? The way the Microsoft engineers will almost certainly do this is by continuing to ship the MSIE rendering engine used by IE7 as a DLL file in IE8. Sure, that'll have all of the failings that IE7 currently does, but that's the point: the page will be rendered by IE7, exactly the same way it does today, because it's the same code doing the rendering. You do know that 'Internet Explorer' is just a thin wrapper around the rendering engine/library, and that the engine is used by many other applications as well, right? (Come to think of it, they probably won't have to ship the DLL with IE8, because it'll already be on everyone's system to support the non-IE applications that depend on it.)

If another browser sees that made-for-IE7 tag, it must recreate all of IE7's quirks (and those of IE6 and IE8 and IE9...)

What are you smoking? Why would other browsers do anything differently than they do today? We're talking largely about standards-compliant pages that have IE-specific tweaks that are triggered by IE6 and IE7 specific bugs, and making sure that when IE8 is released it won't get tripped up by those tweaks... if the page explicitly says "I'm for IE7", then IE8 will act like IE7 and display the tweaks like IE7 would. If the page says "I'm for IE8", then IE8 will act like a standards-compliant browser, and render the page normally (assuming the page author has altered things like conditional comments so that they only apply to IE6 and IE7). If the page doesn't say which way to go, I think the plan is for IE8 to act like IE7, to avoid breaking pages in the common case which is that most pages today are designed to render ok in IE7.

Re:Wait a second?

[totally bogus dude]

Well, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that IE isn't standards compliant. It was never standards compliant, so why is it suddenly a problem that needs solving? Simply, because everything else (more or less) is compliant, and they realise that IE will become increasingly irrelevant if it refuses to play nicely with the rest of the world.

So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE! Rename the new version to "Windows Intranet Application Host" since that's about all it's good for anyway. There's enough other browsers already, and it's likely more would be created to fill the void left by MSIE. We now have reasonably well defined standards and several implementations of interoperable browsers; we simply don't need IE8.

People could still use IE 6 or 7 for legacy web sites and internal applications until they're no longer needed, at which point they'd just die off gracefully.

Okay, maybe it's not realistic, but it would be nicer than forcing the entire internet community to endure yet another round of Microsoft's ineptitude.

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

The point is, why should you have to do any of this crap in the first place? You should not do any extra work to make compliant pages render correctly in a broken browser.

If you just enjoy yelling at the windmills, have fun. Me, I've got a job to do, and I need to deal with the reality that 40% of my users have IE7, 30% have IE6, and only 15% have Firefox. My users don't care what my browser preference is, but my bosses sure do care about how my application looks in the browsers my users are using.

Re:Wait a second?

[that this is not und]

It may be time for an apache extension that inserts this tag into anything it serves out. Is that feasible?

Re:Wait a second?

[pigwin32]

Yep, this sucks as a solution. Sure, get IE 8, change your site so that it works with it, do the meta tag, publish and then realise that your pages are now busted for all those customers still using IE 7/IE 6. The best solution is to keep using DOCTYPE switching and let web developers continue to sniff old versions of IE until they die of old age (the browsers that is, and hopefully not the developers). I've spent considerable time cursing IE in its various versions on both Windows and Mac but there was always that small glint of light discernible at the end of the tunnel where I can just turn off support for those old browsers. The best approach is to check your logs people, see what browsers are being used to access your site, even log enough info to match a customer to a browser. When usage drops below a threshold turn off support and if your customer base is small enough, contact those users that will be impacted. This works, I've done it, and the affected users are normally happy to upgrade.

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

I'm sick of having to implement different pages for different browser. The IE 8 proposal only exacerbates this problem to the extreme. Yes, it'll be very easy to add a "it works in ie8" tag...except that you need to support SEVERAL browsers, at least firefox and safari. You'll need to implement another TWO implementations of your page...or let firefox/safari to use the ie7 mode.

Today, I have standards-compliant pages that Firefox handles just fine (maybe the latest Safari release does too, if they've fixed long-standing javascript bugs which have prevented my company from officially supporting them) and I have conditional comments and some CSS traps which Firefox ignores but IE6 and IE7 use to tweak the rendering for them. When IE8 is first released, I'll have exactly the same thing, with a header that ensures IE8 behaves exactly like IE7. After my QA department spends some time testing IE8 in it's standards-compliant mode, I'll change the header, and IE8 will start rendering the pages like Firefox does, ignoring the conditional comments and CSS traps. The only thing I need to change is the conditional comments, to make them say "IE6 and IE7" instead of "IE >= 6".

Re:Wait a second?

[Kjella]

Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5? No that's not what it's for. You release a browser that's supposed to support DOCTYPE $foo, but it has bugs. Lazy people make web pages with DOCTYPE $foo that rely on bugs. Now you want to fix that bug without breaking pages(*). It's impossible to tell from DOCTYPE $foo whether it expects broken behavior or not. Releasing a new DOCTYPE doesn't have any meaning because the standard hasn't changed, the spec would be "just like the old DOCTYPE except you can't rely on bugs x, y and z". Pinning it at IE7 means "I know the IE7 implementation works, I don't know if the IE8+ implementation does."

(*) By some defintions it's always been broken, since it doesn't comply with the spec. But users seeing a broken page on a broken browser that looks right doesn't care. And for the users on a compliant browser it will always be broken regardless of tagging. The only thing linking it to a specific implementation would do is to prevent it from suddenly becoming broken because a bug in that implementation was fixed. But I'd say that's pretty important so the developers of the browser can make the necessary changes without getting slammed over breaking existing sites. Don't you?

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be inconvenienced, then perhaps in future they'll put more thought into what they choose to make use of.

Re:Wait a second?

[Jugalator]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant? No, but if you don't, IE 8 may not render it properly. I'll then rather say: Too bad for IE 8.

Re:Wait a second?

[JackHoffman]

the page will be rendered by IE7

No, it will be rendered by something which is almost IE7. Microsoft's inability to make new software correctly render the document formats of its predecessors is legendary. The concept of using older rendering engines for testing isn't new, yet we still need to test with actual old browser versions in virtual machines precisely because that's the only way to get actually reliable results.

Why would other browsers do anything differently than they do today?

Because each value of that header defines a rendering mode. Not rendering it accordingly is a failure of the browser. It's the return of designed-for-IE in machine readable form, with everybody else scrambling to implement the quirks of the browser with the highest market share.

I think the plan is for IE8 to act like IE7

No, the plan is certainly to make IE8 act like IE6 if the tag is not present, because, as you might have heard, many businesses are still holding off on the IE7 upgrade because it would break their business web applications.

The whole thing is an attempt to make implementation replace specification, which is especially devious coming from a closed source company.

Re:Wait a second?

[springbox]

It's not when you're trying to make your now "broken" site work correctly with IE

Re:Wait a second?

[diegocgteleline.es]

After my QA department spends some time testing IE8 in it's standards-compliant mode, I'll change the header, and IE8 will start rendering the pages like Firefox does

What makes you think that Firefox and IE8 will behave exactly in the same way?...

A browser-specific flag is only going to create problems for webmasters, now and forever...

Re:Wait a second?

[CastrTroy]

You shouldn't have to add a tag just to get the browser to work correct in the first place. Let's all remember that there's already a doctype tag. If you have a doctype tag, and your document doesn't comply to that spec, then that's your own fault. Be it XHTML Strict, HTML 4 Strict, or whatever other doc type you've specified, that is how it should be rendered. If MS has now come up with a more correct way to render properly formatted documents, then they should render all the documents that say they are standards compliant.

Re:Wait a second?

[Skreems]

You know firefox falls into compatibility mode without a doctype tag, right?

Re:Wait a second?

[CastrTroy]

That's actually not a bad idea. Although it doesn't seem like something that MS would do. Let's remember that MS is the one who won't drop a single piece of backwards compatibility even if it means their OS will be a steaming pile of crap. They would be better off if they just dropped all the backwards compatibility, and just ran all the old stuff in an emulated version of the old OS.

Re:Wait a second?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Heck, no, if I specify XHTML strict, it should render strict. The doctype does say enough. Those who want to adhere to standards just say "strict" and that's it....

IE's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change.

There you have it... It wasn't rendering accurately... Who's at fault, eh?

A bunch of web developers specified XHTML strict when it used IE6 specific hacks. Since IE6 had bugs, it rendered correctly thinking it was strict. So, MS doesn't want all those sites to break. So it says that XHTML strict means IE6 hackery. Because that doesn't conflict with people who trusted them, only those who didn't.

Each part seems reasonable (if you assume that web developers only test on one browser.) People tested it. It worked. They thought it was strict and called it so. MS doesn't break things for developers, which is why so many developers use MS products. Cause they don't break. They said, we need a new type outside the standard because the standard got warped.

Every business I've been in operates the same way. Deal with malformed input as best you can. If a lot of the data relies on a misinterpertation, you keep that going. The next version is not allowed to fix the misinterpertation. Instead, you create a new syntax that uses the data format you initially wanted, and only use a different tag (in XML), so that only new data gets new processing.

How else would it work? "Screw the world, adhere to standards or get fucked?" No other field works like that. It's time for XHTML 2.0 strict, which is really XHTML 1.0 strict, sans IE 6.0 crap. Is it fair? No. But it's realistic.

Re:Wait a second?

[Ash Vince]

You shouldn't have to add a tag just to get the browser to work correct in the first place. Maybe in your strange web utopia, but here in there real world I have spent the last 5 year developing websites for people who only gave a shit about IE and sometimes gave me a deadline of the day before I started the project (the work I started today was due on Friday). I can honestly say that a large proportion of the work I have done will not render in my chosen browser (mozilla under linux).

I am not proud of this but with tight deadlines cross browser standards compliance is the first thing to slip if you know you are developing a corporate intranet and all the client has deployed is IE6. Anyone who insists on developing for other browers in this situation is just wasting time and hence money.

I do not develop complicated dynamic websites as a religion or hobby, I do it as a job so tailor each project to the clients needs, not my own.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... what?

Re:Wait a second?

[soliptic]

It was deliberate ;)

Re:Wait a second?

[CyborgWarrior]

But you must admit, it has served them very very well. So why stop now?

Re:Wait a second?

[EdelFactor19]

or you could just code to standards to begin with... then it would work wherever. This isn't like programming an application in C to run on linux or windows and needing complicated macros to ensure that the right libraries and api's (system calls) are used. This is a freaking XML document. If you actually wrote it properly it would work EVERYWHERE; there is no "porting it to work on mozilla/firefox".

Its a lot like hard coding type sizes in a c program; you could write " int a = (int *)malloc(4);" becuase on your platform ints are size 4... but if you wrote the damn thing properly the first time, using the sizeof operator to get the size of an int, it would work EVERYWHERE.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your projects have 180%? That's intense.

Re:Wait a second?

[Bitsy Boffin]

Now you want to fix that bug without breaking pages(*).

THIS is the problem. How on earth did we get into this mindset that every browser revision must not cause "breakage" (for want of a better word) to existing pages which were supposed to have been adherant to a documented standard by virtue of containing an appropriate doctype.

Those pages that "break" were broken before, it's up to the person responsible for those pages to fix them by testing thier site in that new browser and seeing if anything needs doing (in the pre-release period if thier smart).

I wouldn't mind if browsers implemented a meta-tag/http header check which said "render this as an older non compliant version", it just makes the "fixing" job easier for those people who wrote broken code because they only need to add this tag. But I certainly do NOT support a tag that effectively says "render this with the best adherance to the standards you can, I know I already told you that in the doctype, but I really mean it this time, really!".

I blame designers largely, partiularly those ones (and sadly, in my experience, it's the majority) who get pissed off when thier site doesn't look EXACTLY (to the pixel) the same in all the different browsers. Not only are they likely to employ various hackery to get it that way, but they are also the ones to jump up and down when a new browser comes out and makes thier design shift a pixel to the right.

Re:Wait a second?

[milsoRgen]

Firefox is not bugfree -- it leaks like a sieve (or "fragments"), chewing up half your RAM.
Funny that. I have a Logitech G-15 Gaming Board. I can see my memory usage 24/7 and I watch. Yes Firefox uses more of ram, than say IE or Opera. and it's been detailed how to address that here on slashdot in the about:config function. But to keep it short I have never seen any evidence of a memory leak in Firefox 2.

Re:Wait a second?

[edumacator]

I agree with you in principle, - And as a caveat, I'll point out, I'm only trying to learn to code to standards now - but I think the GP is pointing out, that in order to code to standards and then have a page render well in IE6, is more time consuming than coding specifically for IE6.

I think we would all agree that's relatively short sighted, but many people don't look at the big picture when they are up against a hard deadline. One could argue, that looking back, it would make more sense to code to standards, so when the client deploys IE7, the program wouldn't become archaic.

As I'm learning to code to standards...slowly...I have begun to understand the loathing so many coders have for MS. But they are in a tough spot on this one. It's easy for us to say, "Well it's the designers fault if his site doesn't render well in a compliant browser. But as a business, if IE8 doesn't render my mom's favorite knitting site that was created by some knitter in FrontPage, she isn't going to think that the designer was crap...she'll think it's the new fangled thingy that her son installed (Of course I would install FF, but just supposing...) that isn't working right, and IE8 loses market share.

Hopefully over time, the extra tag will become superfluous as really bad websites are deprecated. And IE9 will be perfect. (Giggles at the funny joke.)

Re:Wait a second?

[Fallen Seraph]

Ummm, way to insult sysadmins. I work in IT at the world's 10th largest company, and we've gone so far as to install firefox with IEView for the intranet web portal just so we can get that garbage off our machines.

What they need to do is release IE8 with a "surf as IE7" and "surf as IE6" option. So the USER can control it, and the web will be the same. Eventually those pages still coded for IE6 will move on to standards compliance and that button will simply be ignored.

Re:Wait a second?

[Max Threshold]

IE6 and IE7 break standards. That's the problem. Developers shouldn't have to waste man-hours supporting Microsoft's non-compliance.

And there is no such thing as a "de-facto standard" where an official standard exists, you fucking dipshit.

Re:Wait a second?

[STrinity]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant?

And the tag probably isn't W3C compliant.

Re:Wait a second?

[cduffy]

You can boot 64 bit windows, run a 16 or 32 bit Windows API app, open a shell window and run a 16 bit DOS app.

...and that's why DOSBox is so popular, right?

Sure, Microsoft tries hard to be backwards-compatible -- but that's not to say they get it right. I'm not saying it's a matter of competence -- it's a hard problem at times -- but just because they try hard doesn't mean they succeed.

Re:Wait a second?

[spyowl]

Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?

Feel free to find out because if you read the linked MSDN blog entry (which you clearly didn't) from which I quoted in my original post (which you clearly didn't read either), Microsoft still doesn't get it.

Re:Wait a second?

[Darinbob]

No no. The flag is necessary to tell the browser to stop being Microsoft compliant, and instead start being compliant with some other lesser standards group.

Re:Wait a second?

[MeNeXT]

let's make a standard by creating a none standard tag and pretend we are standard compliant.

DOCTYPE is there just for that. There's nothing imformative about this. Code for standards......

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

You spend 90% of your time making the website. It then takes another 90% to make it render properly in IE [ ... ] thus causing you take 80% more time to create the site than it should have. I'm gonna have to spend 260% of my next 5 minutes explaining to you what percentages normally add up to ;)

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently in the web design world people can't do math

Re:Wait a second?

[Unoti]

or you could just code to standards to begin with... then it would work wherever.

Clearly, you're not a web developer. Make some websites that use css heavily and come back and check with us. Non-trivial projects that position their elements using CSS definitely work differently in Firefox vs. IE. Much of the time you're fine in both browsers. But a lot of the time you're not. When you write a thousand hours of web work or more per year, you run into it a lot. When you piddle around with it from time to time, you don't.

Re:Wait a second?

[tepples]

Let's remember that MS is the one who won't drop a single piece of backwards compatibility even if it means their OS will be a steaming pile of crap. I disagree. Case in point: 64-bit Windows does not come with a way to run 16-bit DOS apps, 32-bit DOS apps, and 16-bit Windows apps in a virtual machine.

Re:Wait a second?

[Metasquares]

Ironically, your best bet in such a situation is probably to use tables. No, it isn't "proper", but they tend to render more consistently across browsers, likely because they're older and less complex than most of the CSS that replaces them. Also, certain things are unnecessarily complicated in CSS but trivial in tabular layouts, like vertically centering the content of block elements (without doing kludgey things like setting the line height to 100%, vertical-align won't work for this purpose... except on a table cell).

My own answer is to insist on projects that have deadlines sufficient for their scope rather than compromising on the quality or compatibility of the site, but that's a luxury only available to those who freelance, of course.

Re:Wait a second?

[Tsorath]

I don't know I read all this stuff and and all I see is arrogance. It's an I'm smart everyone else is stupid kind of attitude which to me seems really short sighted. Yes MS makes major screw ups and causes major headaches for many people that have to deal with thier mistakes on a daily basis but at the end of the day 99% of the people out there really could care less that there are "better" browsers out there or that MS screwed yet another thing upall they care about that when they go to the web sites of thier choosing they work with the most convenient browser for them which for that large majority of them is IE. I say get over it its old news for people in the industry and it never was news for people that aren't.

Re:Wait a second?

[hahn]

Problem is that you're thinking of this from the user perspective. If YOU ran Microsoft, would you do that?? If you did, and I were a MSFT shareholder, I'd vote to have you fired. The real problem is here is the irrational hatred of ANYTHING that Microsoft does. If they had done what you suggested, no doubt that many posters (perhaps even you), would then rake Microsoft over the coals for leaving behind so many users. And then proceed to cackle gleefully as Microsoft's IE8 marketshare never gains a foothold. Apparently, the only thing that will satisfy some people is if Microsoft commits corporate suicide.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or get fired because the boss uses MSIE6, refuses to upgrade, and doesn't take kindly to you telling him that he doesn't use a "proper browser", accurate or not.

Re:Wait a second?

[CastrTroy]

Using tables works until you want to change the layout a little bit. Then you have to completely rework your page. If you just want to do a design, and then never change it, or throw it away completely when you are done, then tables are fine for you. But if you want a design you can easily change and add to over time, tables will be more trouble than they are worth.

Re:Wait a second?

[Phil06]

The www.andr0meda.com website in your sig has numerous html errors

Re:Wait a second?

[vertigoCiel]

The average IE-using visitor to your site will not understand why your site fails to render properly in their browser. They're just using the default browser that came with their computer - they have no understanding of standards or standards-compliance. They'll assume that the fault lies with your site, and go on their merry way.

Yes, it's inane and ridiculous to have to add another tag clarifying standards compliance. But it's the best way to continue to support as many sites as possible. It's their fault thousands of websites had to have IE specific hacks, but at least they're changing that now. It could be worse. When dealing with M$, any improvements are a feat in of themselves.

Re:Wait a second?

[theJML]

Standards are great. Everybody should have one.

Re:Wait a second?

[Your.Master]

The tag folds into the HTTP header, it's perfectly possible that there's positively 0 bandwidth used (also possible that it adds a couple bytes per page).

And yes, if you look at the article (this one: http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype/), they show how the same tag can and will be used when IE9 comes out, and beyond. And they hope that the competing browsers use it too (it shows firefox as an example).

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this idea, but instead of a meta tag, it should be an image embedded in the document, like "best viewed in ie7" or something like that. That would be awesome. Nothing can possibly go wrong with that idea.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

The tag folds into the HTTP header, it's perfectly possible that there's positively 0 bandwidth used

What the hell? People who think that HTTP headers don't use bandwidth should not comment on these topics. Your site probably uses some big ass cookies, but you can't find why it's slow via dialup. Cookies are just HTTP headers, after all.

Re:Wait a second?

[Your.Master]

> No, the plan is certainly to make IE8 act like IE6 if the tag is not present.

No, the plan is to make it act like IE7 if the tag is not present. Pay attention.

> The concept of using older rendering engines for testing isn't new, yet we still need to test with actual old browser versions in virtual machines precisely because that's the only way to get actually reliable results.

The fact of MS shipping old rendering engines is new.

If they break IE7 back-compat with IE8 even using this tag, then that's their own damn fault and their browser won't work and everybody will hate it.

Re:Wait a second?

[Your.Master]

You can still sniff out IE7 and IE6 even with this.

Re:Wait a second?

[TheCoelacanth]

No, Quirks mode is one of the two previously existing modes. It is used when the document doesn't have a DOCTYPE declaration.

Re:Wait a second?

[Your.Master]

I have the same keyboard, and I have seen such evidence, especially before I got my new computer. Now I have 4 GB of RAM and it's never been an issue, so I stopped caring about the leaks.

Funny though how there's a claim that all memory leaks are in extensions or are just a myth, until just before every major release since 1.0 (1.5, 2.0, 3.0 upcoming) they find that there were some leaks, fix them, and say "seriously, now they're all gone".

Re:Wait a second?

[Your.Master]

It's perfectly compliant.

Re:Wait a second?

[Dan Schulz]

Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.

News flash. This is 2008, not 1998. As for detection, you should be using object detection, not browser (or even version) detection since not every version of every browser supports the exact sae specifications and standards (or as the W3C calls them, "recommendations") 100%. But that's beside the point.

The problem which resulted in this "solution" (I think of it more as a stopgap measure and ironically, Jeffrey Zeldman feels the same way) is two-fold.

The first one is obvious because it is so easy for people to (in this case correctly) place blame. Microsoft. After the release of Internet Explorer 6 and the demise of Netscape's popular browser - which came about not primarily due to the problems with Netscape 4.7, but instead the company waiting too long to come out with the Gecko rendering engine that would become the cornerstone of Mozilla Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers -Microsoft simply saw no real need to "update" the browser. As far as the company was concerned, they had "won". Their browser was the dominant browser on the market, everyone used it and it was installed on every new PC, whether people wanted it or not. At the time, Opera's browser sucked worse than a box of rocks (as far as I'm concerned Opera didn't truely become ready for "prime time" until Opera 8.5 was released), Safari really hadn't come on to the scene yet, and Konqueror was the "browser" of choice for those using Linux (at least KDE anyway). Microsoft had crushed the competition at the time and figured that the "war" was over. That is until Netscape open-sourced their new rendering engine, the Mozilla Foundation got started on their Mozilla Suite (and its eventual successor, Firefox), and Opera finally pulled their collective heads out of their rectums and did what many thought was impossible - rewrite the rendering engine and make a product that worked (which again, was a process that culminated in the release of Opear 8.5). Now Microsoft finds itself in the unenviable position of playing "catchup", especially after five long years - talk about having to eat crow while having egg on one's face.

The second part is the Web designers and developers (which I happen to be). Now, as a Mentor on the Design Team over at the SitePoint forums, I probably shouldn't be saying this, but a lot of designers and developers just flat out don't know any better. And a lot of the ones who do think they know actually don't. Thankfully this has changed a lot (at least over at SitePoint anyway) in the year and a half I've been helping people on their forums, but if you look just about anywhere else you'll see one of two types of designer. The "Code for Firefox, Hack for IE" crowd, and those who build for IE, and pray that it works elsewhere (or just flat out pretend that IE is the only browser out there).

What both camps should instead be doing is writing clean, minimal, semantic, and valid (X)HTML (I honestly don't care if they use HTML or XHTML, even if served as HTML, as long as they are aware of the limitations of each DOCTYPE and don't abuse the languages) to mark up the contents and structure of their pages and then write clean, minimal, valid and warning-free (the latter is optional, for those who care) CSS to present the appearance of that well structured content to the browsers.

The HTML part isn't hard, I mean if you don't know how to mark up a masthead, menu, content area, sidebar(s), and footer, use headings correctly, mark up blocks of code, quote other pages and people, cite your sources, et cetera, and have the markup be independent of the design (within reason, of course), then you need to learn PDQ. At most it'll involve "unlearning" what you already thought you knew (who thought Homeritis would be a good thing? If you're wondering it's "Eve

Re:Wait a second?

[Dhalka226]

Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?

We're not. We're working around Microsoft's bugs for our customers (clients), and our customers' customers. If we're not professionals, we're working around their bugs because we want people to be able to see the content we've worked pretty hard to create.

If Microsoft and its employees were the only ones affected by such a decision, it would be a no-brainer. I'd do it out of spite in absence of any other benefits. But so long as it would hurt well over 1 in every 2 people on the Web, I'll continue to bitch at my monitor as I work around them.

Re:Wait a second?

[STrinity]

"Oh, jokes. I get jokes. Ha ha ha!"
-Homer Simpson

Re:Wait a second?

[godless dave]

What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people? Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site? It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?

I think there's a pretty simple solution. Have "quirks" mode render the old way, so sites written for IE6 and IE7 will render in "quirks" mode. Have "strict" mode render them according to standards. Very simple. If you have a website written for IE6 or IE7, you don't have to rewrite the whole thing, just make sure you're using the correct doctype.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a lot like hard coding type sizes in a c program; you could write " int a = (int *)malloc(4);" becuase on your platform ints are size 4... but if you wrote the damn thing properly the first time, using the sizeof operator to get the size of an int, it would work EVERYWHERE. Unless you forgot to include stdlib.h, which will be nicely masked due to the unnecessary cast ;)

Re:Wait a second?

[ClosedSource]

Of course if you coded to web standards to begin with - that is when the web was new, you wouldn't be using any "freaking XML" or javascript either. There are more significant and widely used improvements to web development coming from breaking the old standards than there has been from the standards bodies.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Each of Firefox, IE and Safari have enough of a presence now that you have to support them all. Coding to just one then trying to support the other two is madness. The only sane thing to do is code to standards and work around browser bugs as they crop up.

Re:Wait a second?

[WK2]

Well, the "problem" they're trying to solve is that IE isn't standards compliant. It was never standards compliant, so why is it suddenly a problem that needs solving? Simply, because everything else (more or less) is compliant, and they realise that IE will become increasingly irrelevant if it refuses to play nicely with the rest of the world. So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE! ...

I would like Microsoft to drop IE. They could replace it with Firefox, or something else. Their end-users would love them for it. Most of the web will fix itself within a few weeks.

But they won't. The whole point of IE is too break the web. Microsoft does not want the web to work just as well on Linux, or OSX, as it does on Windows. If Microsoft didn't want to break the web, they wouldn't have even created Internet Explorer. Can you think of any legitimate reason for Internet Explorer existing? Does it do anything positive at all?

Re:Wait a second?

[Unoti]

That could well be. But my real point was more about what's practical when doing web work for money. If it renders like crap in IE, the client doesn't care if it's standards compliant. You gotta get paid.

Re:Wait a second?

[ClosedSource]

Some would argue that the TCP/IP "standard" is actually the original coding implementation that everybody uses. Has there actually been a "cleanroom" attempt to implement TCP/IP using only the RFC's by people who know nothing about TCP/IP?

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't this be titled: M$ confirms IE8 will be a bloat

or alternatively

IE8 to define new HTML standard!

Re:Wait a second?

[IAmGarethAdams]

So if I want to make a new browser, I have to not only write it to display pages properly, but I now have to write it to display pages the same way as all the old versions of IE?

Re:Wait a second?

[VagaStorm]

No it is not. If he is, like he stated, coding something for an Intranet where he knows all users will use ie6, coding for ff or safari is a waste of time. It's like making an internal windows program cross platform for +50% the cost even if you don't need it to run on anything but windows. If, how ever he codes for something going on the internet, and his employer says he only needs to code for ie6, he should tell his employer why that is not so.

Re:Wait a second?

[gazbo]

Speaking as one of their end users, I would not thank them. I significantly prefer IE to Firefox - just because you don't doesn't mean that you are "right". For me, IE is faster, lighter, and more stable than FF. If I have a choice of browsers I will go for IE or Opera every time.

I realise this may contradict what you thought was the majority world-view (gleaned from Slashdot), but it turns out it's not. Here's another thing to rock your world: for desktop use, I vastly prefer Windows to Linux. Imagine!

Re:Wait a second?

[gazbo]

Firefox (2 at least) is not standards compliant. Maybe more so than IE7, but it's still not standards compliant. Perhaps you can suggest a 100% compliant brower instead?

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Extra credit: living on the "edge"
For those willing to throw caution to the wind, let the chips fall where they may, or any other manner of colloquialism for coding with reckless abandon, IE will support a keyword value of "edge:"

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />"

Only IE would consder the current version to be 'on the edge'. On the edge with firefox or Opera would be running an alpha or beta build. What's missing from this article is which version is the default - hopefully, it will be 'latest', but I suspect it will be 'ie6 compatabile'.

Anyway, back compat won't as good as you say - as the article says, Office 2007 can't render Word 1.0 documents competely correctly - but what the article forgets is that Office 2007 has all this versioning data available to it. MS can't do perfect it with Office, so they're not going to get it for Internet Explorer.

The real fix is simple. Release a new IE version every year. Give it a year version number - this should be IE 2008. Next year should be 2009. Stop things stagnating. And end users to simply not tolerate sites that lag too far behind. (The argument that "edge" might subject you to scripting/layout bugs illustrates what heck is actually wrong here and the mentality of MS and this author is simply broken - that is ONLY a problem with Internet Explorer because every other web browser has the bugs *FIXED* in a sensible timeframe. People upgrade. Bugs are fixed. Web developers don't have to care. Except for, of course, IE, because it's several years old already.)

Re:Wait a second?

[amorsen]

Some would argue that the TCP/IP "standard" is actually the original coding implementation that everybody uses.

Modern TCP stacks generally bear very little resemblance to the original code. The myths about Microsoft using the BSD TCP stack are false. And don't bring out the crap about doing strings on FTP.EXE.

Re:Wait a second?

[cp.tar]

I don't know I read all this stuff and and all I see is arrogance.

Good.

What you're really seeing is frustration, but if it comes out as arrogance, even better.
If I came out as merely frustrated, you'd think I were just btching and moaning and would likely simply dismiss anything I had to say; now that I came off as arrogant, you felt you needed to respond in a less dismissive manner.

Not the most productive strategy, I admit, but in the face of the prevailing opinion that web developers are supposed to make every POS work with their pages, no matter how broken it may be, I feel that arrogance is most likely to be heard.

It's an I'm smart everyone else is stupid kind of attitude which to me seems really short sighted.

I'm trying to think of some reasons for not calling exclusive IE users uneducated at the very least, but so far I'm failing.

Care to enlighten me?

Yes MS makes major screw ups and causes major headaches for many people that have to deal with thier mistakes on a daily basis

Well, I'm offering them a way out. Not taking it? Hey, be a beaten wife for all I care, but don't come crying to me if you refuse to walk out on your abusive husband.

but at the end of the day 99% of the people out there really could care less that there are "better" browsers out there or that MS screwed yet another thing up

Well, you just said that they could care less, which means that they do care.

You probably intended to say ust the opposite, but now you're proving me right.

all they care about that when they go to the web sites of thier choosing they work with the most convenient browser for them which for that large majority of them is IE.

And I'm making it less convenient by doing nothing wrong, and not fixing what ain't broken.

The very point is in making it less convenient.

BTW, here in Europe Firefox has a marketshare between 20% and 50%, depending on the country.
Think about it.

I say get over it its old news for people in the industry and it never was news for people that aren't.

Well, time for it to become news to people, I say.

Re:Wait a second?

[cp.tar]

Firefox (2 at least) is not standards compliant. Maybe more so than IE7, but it's still not standards compliant. Perhaps you can suggest a 100% compliant brower instead?

As I've said before, 90% compliant is better than 60% compliant.

Re:Wait a second?

[jeanph01]

I understand Ms position. They want to be backward compatible. Can I suggest something, why not put the better standards compliant renderer by default and use the old one with the said tag?

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on slashdot will you find someone complaining about a 20 byte header for a 100k webpage containing more than 20 bytes of unnecessary whitespace...

Re:Wait a second?

[wertigon]

They could, however, go the other way around;

• Full Doctype triggers Standards mode in IE8
• Full Doctype + Meta tag triggers IE7 mode
• Incomplete doctype triggers Quirks mode

This way, only the sites which utilize a *full* doctype and are at the same time *nonstandard* are affected, and could possibly break. And if it breaks, it's an easy fix (just do a find/replace: s/<head>/<head><meta value="use-ie7-engine">/g)

Wait, doesn't this mean the developers of those legacy pages have to actually do some work???

Yes, it does. Indeed it does. But if those developers claiming standard-compliance by using the full doctype had done their job properly to begin with, this would be a non-issue. It's a simple fix for legacy code, doesn't break any sites in quirks mode, and more importantly doesn't break those sites people managed to get right. Why should I have to be punished for following the open standards of the web? Standards all browsers worth their salt claims they can handle?

Re:Wait a second?

[dave420]

If they didn't do it this way, then they'd effectively break the web for all their users. Considering that's most of the people using the web, it's a big deal. I'm sure most people who use the web don't care how standards-compliant their browser, or indeed the site they're viewing, is. They just want it to work. We're only in this mess because when IE was first stretching its legs in the competition against Netscape, the standards were not moving quickly enough, or were flawed, and Microsoft (and indeed Netscape) stepped in and added their own code to get things working. It allowed the web to grow far more quickly than if everyone waited for the standards, putting up with the problems caused by a slow standard development. I'm all for standards, but you have to understand they can be a boon and a burden. They're a boon when they're working quickly enough (a massive, massive boon), and when they're slow, they're a massive, massive pain in the ass, that can severely limit that which they describe. I'm not saying MS has done everything right (or even much right), but to lambast them for not wanting to break most web users' experience is a bit 'tarded.

Re:Wait a second?

[dave420]

You shouldn't have to lock your door to keep thieves out, so by that logic you keep yours open, then bitch and moan that someone robbed your house. Using computers shouldn't be about slinging blame, but about getting on with using them. Saying "this doesn't work because of company X" doesn't make it work any better. Microsoft is trying to make a standards-compliant browser that is also backwards-compatible with their browsers for the better part of the last decade. And you moan about it. Jesus.

Re:Wait a second?

[dave420]

That's hilarious. Their websites were not broken, but just not standards-compliant. When a car is broken, it doesn't work. When a website is not standards-compliant, it still works. Standards-compliance is not the be-all and end-all of a website - it being USED is. It would be the most ridiculously immature act ever if Microsoft said it is going to destroy compatibility for all previous rendering modes in what will become the most widely-used browser on the web. The internet is not an experiment, it is not an ideology, it is not a religion, it is a TOOL. You're treating it like it's something far more.

Re:Wait a second?

[Threni]

> Simply, because everything else (more or less) is compliant, and they realise that IE will become increasingly irrelevant if it refuses to play
> nicely with the rest of the world.

It would have been nice if something like Gmail deliberately failed on IE, with a message to the effect that Gmail was an app which required a standards compliant browser, and which then directed you to a list of compliant browsers.

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

So if I want to make a new browser, I have to not only write it to display pages properly, but I now have to write it to display pages the same way as all the old versions of IE?

Only if your new browser happens to be a new version of IE, and for some reason you can't just use the existing implementations (DLLs) of the old versions of IE

In other words, no.

Re:Wait a second?

[jargon82]

Clearly, you were not around in the early days of IE. The alternatives at the time were terrible. Or, you have chosen to forget said times ;)

Re:Wait a second?

[plague3106]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant? That's insane

If you read the article, you'd see that <DOCTYPE> is exactly the same kind of thing. Did you complain when DOCTYPE was added?

Re:Wait a second?

[Porchroof]

Those who can't avoid using profanity in their posts should be ignored.

Re:Wait a second?

[CastrTroy]

They all use IE6 now. In 5 years, people will probably still be using that intranet application. Will they all still using IE6? It's a lot easier to code to standards and work around the bugs than it is to code to one specific version of one specific browser, and hope that nobody will ever want to use a different browser for your application.

Re:Wait a second?

[CastrTroy]

While that may be true, I haven't seen a lot of computers for sale that have 64 bit windows. Almost all the new computers support 64 bit computing, but only a very small percentage are sold with 64 bit Vista.

Re:Wait a second?

[pizzach]

I agree with your point when it comes to differences between ie6 and ie7. But with ie8, the standard complaint rendering engine should be reasonably similar to ie7's. On top of that, people who are using the correct doctype to signal strict html rendering are most likely expecting better rendering down the road from ie and in the mean time do their initial layout testing on a gecko or webkit or presto based browser.

. In addition to preventing tens of thousands of websites from breaking, there are plenty of CDs and other media containing websites written over the last 10 years.

Holy fuckshit batman! Wasn't that the point of implementing standards in the first place? So the browsers that are given a specific doctype will render the same? And in the future if we want to add features we can just up the html version number? Are you TRYING to destroy that concept? Don't fuck with my standards. I want MY pages to display correctly in 10 years on _ANY_ browser.

If you want to keep your crappy ie6 rendering for future compatibility, use the damned html 4 transitional doc type. Hell, firefox will also go into quirks mode for you when you do that too.

<--[if IE 6]--><a href="http://www.mozilla.org">Please</a> <a href="http://www.windowsupdate.com">do</a> <a href="www.opera.com">something</a> <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">something</a> about your browser<![endif]-->

<--[if IE 7]-->Don't fuck with my IE 6 pages but reasonably improve stict rendering<![endif]-->

<--[if IE 8]-->Don't fuck with my strict rendering<![endif]-->

Re:Wait a second?

[bryanthompson]

Exactly right. I don't even preview my layouts in IE until I am sure that they are safe for the standards-compliant browsers, then I implement all of the stupid IE hacks all in one sweep at the end. It takes maybe 5 minutes because the majority of the hacks are predictable.

I'm as pissed about IE still being crap as the next guy, but we have to deal with reality here. It is easy to piss and moan about how shitty IE is, but the fact is, it STILL has huge marketshare and will be around for awhile. 90% of the visitors to my sites are on IE 6 or 7, which is way out of line with the rest of the internet. It doesn't ruin my day to know that when I'm finished with a site or modification that I have to check it in IE, but it does annoy me.

Re:Wait a second?

[Stewie241]

No...

The user shouldn't have to try and figure out what browser they want to surf with... I shouldn't have to try three options to get the right one to use to view the page... that is tedious and a PITA.

Microsoft realizes here that the average end user has little idea why Firefox is better than Microsoft in terms of rendering. Most of the web works for them, and once it stops, they aren't going to want to upgrade.

Re:Wait a second?

[Cjstone]

Or leave it broken for the people without a proper browser. If it's strict, it's strict. If your browser cannot render strict properly, go and bitch to the manufacturer. Unfortunately, that would mean that your site doesn't render properly in ~90% of computers, leading most users to think your site was poorly made. Like it or not, Microsoft is the de-facto standard, which means they can easily bully developers into doing things the "Microsoft way." It's definitely not the way things should be, but it's the way things are.

Re:Wait a second?

[SCHecklerX]

There is nothing wrong with using a special (standards compliant) tag to tell the browser to render differently than normal. In addition to preventing tens of thousands of websites from breaking, there are plenty of CDs and other media containing websites written over the last 10 years. Should all these become unusable just because Microsoft updated their browser? Is adding one tag really that much trouble for you?

There *is* a problem with it. The problem is, as I understand it, that without the tag, the browser will revert to the old and broken rendering mode. It will render your *COMPLIANT* page incorrectly. The way it *SHOULD* work is if you want to do something out of spec for backwards compatibility, make *THOSE* pages have a "this page is not quite right but will render in M$'s broken browsers" tag.

Forcing you to add a tag to ensure that MSIE will render using the standard mode (which should be the *DEFAULT*) is ludicrous.

Re:Wait a second?

[BasharTeg]

I love how everyone implies through all of their Microsoft bashing that IE is the only browser that isn't "standards compliant". This statement from webreference.com really sums it up nicely:

A compliant browser is one that follows the CSS and HTML specifications to the letter. Well, that's not really true--as of early 2006, no browser can legitimately claim 100% standards compliance. However, there are browsers that get very close, to the extent that they can be treated as basically compliant. This is the category we'll call compliant browsers, although if you want to be pedantic, you can think of this as the "almost compliant" group instead. -- Kynn Bartlett, webreference.com

The fact is, this all important and gospel standard has exactly ZERO fully compliant implementations. What other language specification used so widely has exactly zero fully compliant implementations? Apparently the rule for deciding if a browser is going to be bashed for standards compliance is "at least as good as Firefox." So we ignore the fact that none of the other browsers have got it right yet, they got it "close enough."

Obviously, the CSS support in IE is currently shit, and we'd all like to see it improve. I just don't like how everyone treats the CSS standards as if they're some holy gospel of truth, and as if the standard has been *right there* for years and you still can't get it right. If the standards were so great and so obvious to implement, there would be 100% standards compliant browsers out there. If Firefox and Safari were 100% standards compliant and IE was not, you'd have a leg to stand on. The fact is, the web standards are growing, as the web is growing, and there are going to be growing pains along the way.

Microsoft is finally taking action to reach at least the same "good enough" level of CSS support that we accept in other browsers. In doing so they can't break half the sites on the web. So shut the hell up and let them get IE8 out so we can have some kind of calm on this subject, and so our web developers can work within some kind of compatible CSS environment, even if it requires a stupid transitionary tag.

Re:Wait a second?

[Miaomiao]

Actually, IE tends to be only in the majority on weekdays, and towards weekends firefox starts taking up 30% of the browser share. During the week, IE 7 has about 30% share, and IE 6 50% (it's slowly losing ground), and firefox 10%. With a mix of browsers after that.

My personal sites get around 60% firefox views, so I'm guessing at home, more people use firefox, and at work, ie. I'd say in releasing IE 8 they should just assume standards compliance, forcing it to use standards is a giant headache. But if they added the tag to force IE 7 rendering it would be more optimal (adding a single tag is much lower maintainance than redesigning a whole site).

Right now it's more of a rough time for the web as everyone adapts and consolidates to a single standard, and everything gets streamlined, it's slow, clunky, and works badly, but as time goes on everything will be smoothed out more.

I hope that when html 5 finally rolls out, IE will get something that will simply be assumed to be compliant across the board and keep rendering to spec, or as close to it as possible.

Re:Wait a second?

[Z00L00K]

Instead of adding more modes to the browser they should add a warning in the same manner as the popup-blocker specifying that "This page does not conform to W3C standards - content may not display correctly".

By doing this as soon as something wrong is detected you will be certain that all those badly written web pages will trickle away. (slowly and with a lot of whining in the beginning, but it will be a great difference after a while.)

With the current approach it's just getting into a deeper bog of dirt than it was before...

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and that's why DOSBox is so popular, right? Popular? As in, more than a few thousand people on Earth have actually had contact with it? Try 'niche'.

DOSBox users have exactly zero relevance as a source of revenue contributing customers for Microsoft. For actual paying customers, however, Microsoft provides extensive support including free tools such as this and platforms such as this. Grownups use these sort of tools to insure important software functions correctly for decades on end.

You may now resume your Leisure Suit Larry.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in your strange web utopia, but here in there real world I have spent the last 5 year developing websites for people who only gave a shit about IE and sometimes gave me a deadline of the day before I started the project (the work I started today was due on Friday).


So some short sighted PHB gets his website broken by IE8. What is the problem? S/he opted for immediate gratification over maintainability. Why should anyone care when the maintenance bill rolls in?

Or are you saying we need to totally fuck over the web to keep short sighted management from being exposed?

Re:Wait a second?

[PastaLover]

No that's not what it's for. You release a browser that's supposed to support DOCTYPE $foo, but it has bugs. Lazy people make web pages with DOCTYPE $foo that rely on bugs. Now you want to fix that bug without breaking pages(*). It's impossible to tell from DOCTYPE $foo whether it expects broken behavior or not. Releasing a new DOCTYPE doesn't have any meaning because the standard hasn't changed, the spec would be "just like the old DOCTYPE except you can't rely on bugs x, y and z". Pinning it at IE7 means "I know the IE7 implementation works, I don't know if the IE8+ implementation does." Sure, I can see your point. Problems though:
- you're breaking all the sites that did code up to the standards and are expecting their new nifty thing to Just Work(TM) in IE, because IE thinks it should be rendering them in IE-6 mode. A minor issue.
- more importantly, whenever you update your rendering engine you'll have to implement a new mode. Think about IE-10 getting released in 5 years time (okay so I'm being optimistic). By that time you'll have a rendering mode for IE-7, one for IE-8, one for IE-9 and one for IE-10. These might render some pages completely the same, or they might not. They will have slight differences between the rendering of the original IE-7 and the current IE-7 mode. They will be a big lump of code your engineers will have to update every single time not only a rendering bug is found for the latest engine, but also when a rendering "bug" is found in the older engine not incorrectly rendering something. The cost of supporting this piece of crap will quickly spiral out of control.

Basically it's the same reason windows XP ended up having so many holes (in its first few incarnations): when you are carrying the weight of 4 to 5 previous versions with you, it is very hard to move forward. Microsoft made the right choice in breaking stuff in Vista, but they did not follow through. The same is now apparently true for internet explorer. This endless pursuit of ill-conceived backwards compatibility is not immediately harmful for the web (which will muddle along), but it's just not a very good business decision by microsoft.

The people from ALA are really kidding themselves if they think other vendors will follow suit. Most likely firefox and opera will just start rendering stuff correctly and let web masters figure out what bugs they fixed by themselves. Backwards compatibility is great and all, but in this case it's unlikely the costs will justify the benefits. In either case, webmasters will be doing extra work trying to be compliant for everyone anyway.

Re:Wait a second?

[Kalriath]

Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5?

Slight problem with that: the W3C has deprecated DOCTYPEs in HTML5/XHTML5, so when HTML6/XHTML6 comes out, the browser will have no bloody idea what version it is.

Re:Wait a second?

[madprof]

You think coding standards-compliant web pages means they are going to work the same in all the major browsers, even when you make sure you specify a strict doctype?

That's unfortunately not true.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

A professional web developer codes to a subset of the standard, the subset which is implemented correctly in the browsers which (a high percentage of) the target audience uses. It's part of the job to determine what that subset is, and part of the know-how which separates the next-door "web designer" from the pro. In some cases, when one of the target browsers has a serious deficiency (I'm looking at you, IE6), it is acceptable to use workarounds to extend that universally available subset, but the result is inevitably that either the web site breaks in new versions of that browser because the assumption is that it needs the workarounds and it doesn't, or the web site breaks because it is assumed that the new browser version doesn't need the workarounds and it does. Therefore it is important to make the fixes modular, so that they can be adjusted with a simple drop-in later on. That's called customer service.

Re:Wait a second?

[jacksonj04]

There's a little part of me which wants to beat you repeatedly for saying that. What's next, framesets?

Re:Wait a second?

[Metasquares]

I was anticipating such a reaction. I never suggested using tables for layout normally, although the end user certainly would not notice the difference, but given a severe time constraint, I suggested it as an alternative to fiddling around with CSS to get things working in IE and other browsers.

Also, both tables and framesets are tools. They do have legitimate uses, and to dogmatically reject them in all situations is foolish. It's like saying you'll never use a hex key because you don't want to accept that hex sockets exist.

Re:Wait a second?

[andr0meda]

Nice try :) I'm not a pro website developer nor do I run pro sites, or pretend to. I agree that it is a bitch to try and make a site run on all browsers, in fact, it's probably THE most annoying thing. But on the other hand that's why such people are getting payed, too. The thing is, one does not really have a choice but to make things work. Picking the top 2 browsers and testing my private websites against them was enough for me, but if your browser complains, tell me how I can reproduce it by email and maybe, if I'm in the mood, I might try to fix it for you.. Everything runs fine on FF. IE should do fine too, but I don't care too much.

Re:Wait a second?

[pigwin32]

My point is that I want to stop sniffing - let nature take its course, old browsers fall into disuse, I get to ditch the sniffing and hacks. Now Microsoft wants me to keep sniffing. This is not a good scenario for me.

Lets say:

1. I currently sniff out IE7 and apply some IE7-specific css or javascript.
2. IE8 comes out and fixes something that would allow me to discard my hack from #1.
3. Unfortunately to make use of that fix I have to alter my html to add the stupid meta-tag.
4. I discard my hack from #1 and add the stupid meta-tag.
5. Damn, now my site no longer works in IE7, what do I do?
6. Oh that's right, I add a sniffer to identify IE7 and apply some IE7-specific css etc

How is this an improvement on my current situation?

Re:Wait a second?

[EdelFactor19]

Yes but the problem is a chain of responsibility thing if you step back.
If programmers adhered to standards then the engines wouldn't have to keep all of the legacy hooks lying around to catch everything else...

once you force the source to be consistently valid, then you can move on to improving the rendering engines. although both need to occur a little bit at the same time.

I agree there is no easy finger pointing; the browser is as much a problem still as the code itself..

My larger problem is that the internet isn't and shouldn't be "microsoft's"; I guess for the first time as I think about this stuff i realize what the browser wars REALLY were about. when they occurred i didnt get it; i just fig'd ok who cares which free browser i'm using if they both do the same thing; all of the analogies ever made in the case were about radios in your car and crap like that....

but its really much more simple and sinister. Its not just that MS puts their radio in your car for free by default and makes it hard to take out; worse is that they create and distribute products that create content which only works in "their" radio. Furthermore they won't offer you their radio unless you buy a car from someone who has agreed to buy everything else of theirs... thats the problem.

By doing this they put a major foot up the rear end of the potential for other operating systems.... As long as MS doesn't create "IE" for linux (not that that is really what i want) they impede on linux or anyother OS from coming around simply by the blockade on the internet.... anyone want to reopen this case and or find a way to force MS to produce internet explorer for linux? again its not that id rather run that then firefox; but the mere fact that they "can't" further demonstrates a potentially unrealized part of the "browser wars monopolistic practices suit" stuff.

again I personally have no interest in it especially as I'd rather see people use things like OO.o; but perhaps this should extend to 'forcing' ms to produce Office for linux; As long as the OS maker is also a Software Maker i dont think it will ever be the case that they cant and wont create new features in the OS that only they can take advantage of.

Re:Wait a second?

[SanityInAnarchy]

When a website is not standards-compliant, it still works.

If Microsoft creates an atmosphere where web developers can be sure that their website will work on all future versions of IE, no matter how broken it is with respect to the standards... what are competitors supposed to do?

Re:Wait a second?

[WK2]

I remember the times. The choice was IE, Netscape, and other. IE and Netscape (up to 4) were pretty much equally tolerable. Netscape had one advantage, that when it crashed, it didn't take Windows down with it. I don't recall any tolerable "others" of the day.

I learned from South Park that you eject your bowels right before dying. Netscape laid Netscape 6, which is right before it died, and was resurrected as a zombie by AOL. I discovered Fire-something in 2003. I used IE in-between those years, because as you said, the choices were pretty bad. But as of now, I don't believe that IE serves any legitimate purpose.

Re:Wait a second?

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU Dumbass that's a stupid idea.

Re:Wait a second?

[Ash Vince]

Hang on a minute. You all seem to be talking like there is a web standard I could code to that would actually work.

Last time I checked there was not a single commercially available web browser that was truly standards compliant, is this still the case?

Will this page render correctly in you browser?

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

I think not if you use an off the shelf browser. I have firefox, IE7, safari and Opera installed on this PC since I am now at work and none of them pass.

So stop talking like there are some defined useable web standards that we can currently use when creating complicated layouts in CSS. Until every browser is truly standards compliant then creating standards compliant web pages is not going to help avoid horrible browser hacks and so is actually me wasting my employers time.

Re:Wait a second?

[Metasquares]

Nice argument. Do you have a better idea?

Re:Wait a second?

[jeremyp]

What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people? Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site?

You make it sound like that would be the end of the World. The fix for most of these broken web sites would be simply to remove the IE specific cruft.

The only way out of this mess is for Microsoft to produce a standards compliant browser. That is, one that is compliant by default, not one where you can turn on compliance if you want to.

The consequences of this would be zero for those of us who don't use IE and initially none for users of IE6 and IE7. However, users of IE the compliant version will have problems and will start complaining to the broken sites, whose owners will eventually be forced to fix the issues as the complaints mount. Once a site is fixed, users of IE6 will start having issues and will be forced to upgrade or move to a different browser. There will be some pain, but it will be over in a few months, whereas the current situation allows web developers (or more accurately, the web site owners who pay them) to be lazy and not bother to fix the bugs and as long as Microsoft implicitly allows this to continue, nothing will change.

Of course, it's not in Microsoft's interest to follow the strategy I defined above because they will inevitably lose some market share as a result.

Re:Wait a second?

[ErkDemon]

So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE!

Wow! What a smart answer!
The MS marketing people could present the all-new standards-compliant browser as "the new web standard for the new century", and people who had websites written for IE (and only IE) wouldn't be able to bitch that their sites no longer worked with IE, because they would. You'd just have a high-profile button and hotkey combination on the new browser for "Launch in Internet Explorer".

And of course you're right, they almost certainly won't do it, it's much too sensible and forward-thinking ...

Re:Wait a second?

[madprof]

It is entirely possible, using Microsoft's conditional comments, to write IE6-specific CSS without affecting any other web browsers.

If you're using some "safe" subset of standards you're going to have to leave out float and thats going to cripple you in quite a few ways.

Re:Wait a second?

[madprof]

Fortunately legacy hooks for IE are easy to manage. However I think Firefox became popular not because coders were trying to use compliant pages but because it was better. This in turn helped coders write more compliant pages and forced Microsoft into releasing a more compliant browser (IE 7) as IE 6 was looking embarassing.

I'm sceptical over coders' ability to make visitors do anything - no one who has any business sense would write a perfectly compliant page that didn't work in IE 6 as they automatifcally chop out (at current figures) 30% of the market or something like that.

Re:Wait a second?

[EddyPearson]

Total Bollocks. If what you say is true then there are as many websites out there who DO NOT WORK in other rendering engines.

Anybody who can't write standard compliant code AND Microsoft hacks, cannot call themselves a Web Designer. In this day and age it's a rudimentary and vital skill.

Like it or not, we NEED to standardise code once and for all, and just sticking in yet ANOTHER layer will simple pave the future for more of this constant dumbfuckery from Microsoft.

This could be seen as a good thing from a webmasters perspective, if from now on we develop STANDARDS compliant websites, and to hell with Microsoft and their silly new tags, they will be forced to finally make their browser truly compliant. Unfortunatly its probably not going to happen, because you just can't hand over a site that doesn't work in IE (as I stated earlier), so its a catch 22.

Microsoft need to step up to fix the problems they've caused, becuase due to their market share, we can't.

In the meantime, I suggest you take the Hixie's adivce:
"I recommend not including the meta tag, or, if you are forced to include it, making sure it says "IE=7", even once IE8 ships."

Just Like Before

[excelblue]

Hence again, MS is imposing its powers of monopoly by forcing us to work around their nonstandard quirks, forcing us to add their own meta tag. Nothing much new here - this is still part of embrace, enhance, extinguish.

Re:Just Like Before

[dedazo]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds? I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks. So you can accept that IE is not going anywhere soon and that this is the only realistic way to handle this problem (admittedly created by Microsoft themselves), or you can go back to the previous crap situation.

The comments on the blog to the tone of "break the web" are amusing. I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know, some technorati bloggers with snazzy-looking web sites signed the W3C suicide pact and wanted everyone to do the same.

Or, use Firefox and convince everyone to do as well. That's what I've been doing lately. Maybe IE8 will pull me back, but IE7 sure has heck didn't.

Re:Just Like Before

[JackHoffman]

It's brilliant: The reason is that there are too many websites out there which work in IE6, but fail miserably in standards compliant browsers. These websites will of course not get that tag. For the the tag to make any sense at all, newer IE browsers must therefore assume that an untagged site expects IE6, so the page will be shown as if the browser were the steaming pile of crap IE6. It's another quirks mode just for IE6, and the only way to escape it is to add a redundant tag.

Re:Just Like Before

[JackHoffman]

You know it's not going to work as designed. Microsoft will expect other browsers to render websites according to the X-UA-Compatible property and point fingers if they don't, but Microsoft will certainly never attempt to render websites like Firefox, Safari or Opera do. The worst part is that the default will be to render like IE6, because all the old sites with broken browser detection code are the reason for this tag. They can't tell IE7 from IE6, and now Microsoft can't deliver a new browser without breaking lots of important business applications.

Re:Just Like Before

[dedazo]

If IE8 works as advertised and renders in standards-compliance mode, then I suspect eventually no one will care. My existing apps don't break, and any new development I do can be standards-specific as well. If you're developing correctly then you can add that header from a centralized location to all your pages and be done with it. But I don't see how Microsoft cannot set the default engine to behave as IE6 does. That would simply break too many things. They have no choice but to find a balance. This is again a situation they contributed a lot to, but complaining about it won't make it go away. Inside the corporate world people could give a rat's ass about standards or browser-agnostic code or pixel-perfect CSS positioning. They just want their payroll/purchasing/inventory system to work.

If IE8 doesn't deliver on the standards thing and doesn't render the same (or sufficiently close) to Firefox and Opera (not to mention DOM fixes), then this whole thing is moot anyway. I can understand IE7 not being perfectly compliant, but IE8 better be.

Re:Just Like Before

[sootman]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore...

I'd be OK with that--one extra line in my 'head.inc'--but that this is MS we're talking about here. The tag they pick that other browsers "should" ignore will probably cause IE/6 to crash. :-)

(Seriously, that has happened.)

Re:Just Like Before

[Bert64]

Only people simply won't bother, they will just write the same crappy nonstandard HTML they have for IE6 because it still works.

Re:Just Like Before

[Columcille]

Large marketshare != monopoly.

Re:Just Like Before

[ivan256]

I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.

But that is what they should do. They should do it because it benefits *everybody*. Including themselves.

Such a move is exactly what would be required to get those sites to comply with standards which would make cross-browser compatibility easier. It would improve the web experience better for people who use browsers other than IE. It would make it possible for them to develop and support (and provide security fixes for) fewer rendering engines. The only downside is that it would make it possible for other browsers to compete on features rather than giving IE a huge upper-hand.

The one thing it *wouldn't* do is "break the web". Only Microsoft arrogance (or Microsoft fanboy arrogance) can possibly think that is the case. You certainly couldn't comfortably use Firefox if that was the case. Corporations would hold off on upgrading to IE8 until the sites they needed came into compliance, and the sites would change rapidly since the only relevant ones left that are using IE6/7 quirks are the ones that hang on Microsoft's every word.

Re:Just Like Before

[the4thdimension]

I'd say just ignore it. Unless you are an e-commerce business, its not much of a big deal. For instance, if you run a tech-based web-blog, a majority of your viewers are likely in Opera or Firefox anyway... IMO, this doesn't change much except forcing big-pages that need complete compatibility to add an additional meta tag.

Re:Just Like Before

[eulernet]

Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks These 'billions' of pages are broken, or will be definitely broken in a few years, so I don't understand your point, except if you intend to use only Microsoft's software for the next 20 years, and we are not sure what will be the most used browser next year.

The problem is that Microsoft want to keep compatibility with its own old buggy browsers, and in the same time, they try to kill their old software (Windows 2000 died recently).

Why not simply drop the compatibility now ? This will force people to upgrade much faster...

Re:Just Like Before

[Arthur B.]

Hence again, MS is imposing its powers of monopoly by forcing us

No one's forcing you to support internet explorer.

Re:Just Like Before

[dedazo]

Well I doubt Microsoft can do a lot about that, other than perhaps convincing more people to use their newer tools which output valid [X]HTML.

Re:Just Like Before

[JackHoffman]

The header is touted as a replacement or augmentation of the doctype definition, which is supposedly broken. Well, it's not. IE can't handle doctypes properly because too many pages were designed-for-IE6 with wrong doctypes and leave newer versions no viable path to standard compliance without being treated like other standards compliant browsers (i.e. identifying as something other than IE.)

So, in order to have their cake and eat it too, Microsoft wants IE to be backwards-compatible to IE6 and more modern at the same time. The only way to do that is to make everybody add a redundant tag, and they trashtalk doctype to get their will. But doctype says to which standard a document was written. Microsoft on the other hand wants developers to keep writing pages to browser versions, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. And tell developers to write to standards, not browsers, and test with more than one browser!

Re:Just Like Before

[AndersOSU]

Ok, I'm not a software or GUI guy of any shade, but I have to wonder why microsoft doesn't simply add a button to their interface (say way down in the lower left of the window) that if clicked switches between the render modes.

This way standards compliant code renders properly without cute little tricks like this, and the user blames the web-developer for the sloppy web page.

It's easy, the first time you open IE8 a page comes up that explains if things don't look quite right, as some pages were designed for older browsers, try clicking this button in the corner and see if it makes things better.

Re:Just Like Before

[oliderid]

Hence again, MS is imposing its powers of monopoly by forcing us to work around their nonstandard quirks, forcing us to add their own meta tag. Nothing much new here - this is still part of embrace, enhance, extinguish. I don't know for the US but in Europe things are a bit different now. The firefox marketshare is quite significant amongst private surfers. Internet Explorer marketshare in the business world is due to the legacy (ActiveX and other similar craps). This legacy is showing its age (new technologies are emerging). The first "faux pas" of Microsoft and Firefox will enter into the business world massively.

Re:Just Like Before

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds?
neither.

I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.
corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet
then add a meta tag that asks IE8 to use IE6 mode. it won't take much time, may be a month at most, for those apps to be updated if some resources are dedicated. and if planned properly it could be deployed over a long weekend.

Re:Just Like Before

[_KiTA_]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds? I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks. So you can accept that IE is not going anywhere soon and that this is the only realistic way to handle this problem (admittedly created by Microsoft themselves), or you can go back to the previous crap situation.

I want them to render HTML properly, without me having to put in little "hooks" to remind their piece of shit browser to do it's job.

They should render everything in the IE8 engine unless some poor misguided IE developer adds a meta-tag on their nonstandard websites, then they can use their fake-HTML rendering engines.

Re:Just Like Before

[cp.tar]

Why not simply drop the compatibility now ? This will force people to upgrade much faster...

Force people into upgrading too soon, and they might upgrade to Linux.

Easy does it. Ease them into upgrading. Keep them addicted.

Re:Just Like Before

[SanityInAnarchy]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds?

How about option 3: Code to the standards, and ignore specific browsers. Obviously, you want to test it in other browsers to expose flaws in your own code/assumptions, but if a browser doesn't work due to actually being non-standard, I want that to be Not My Problem.

I've spent enough of my life hacking workarounds around Microsoft crap. How about they work around the standard for a change?

I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.

They already did, to some extent, with IE7.

Keep in mind, these billions of pages were already broken. They should not have been compatible with anything. Microsoft dropping compatibility for them would actually be a healthy thing, compared with, say, some of the things they broke with Vista.

I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know,

Because, you know, he was a moron who didn't test those apps on IE8 before rolling it out. Didn't know about WSUS, you know. Can I have his job when he's fired for incompetence?

Again: Same thing happened with IE7. Same kind of complaints, same intranets keeping everyone on IE6 for awhile.

The only reason you mention this is the same reason it's not a problem: On intranets, apps tend to be more tied to a single browser, because you can mandate that browser. Because the alternative was even worse -- mandating the install of some custom client-side app, maybe some Visual Basic + Access crap. This same freedom that lets intranet sites be lazy with respect to the standards also allows them to delay IE8 as long as they want -- or, yeah, use Firefox.

Re:Just Like Before

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Because Microsoft's largest customers are business; and businesses don't care about spending huge amounts of cash to make their intranets standards compliant. They want things to continue to Just Work.

Re:Just Like Before

[eulernet]

Because Microsoft's largest customers are business; and businesses don't care about spending huge amounts of cash to make their intranets standards compliant. They want things to continue to Just Work. In this case, why will the next Microsoft update force IE7 for all users ? Don't tell me that 100% of the sites that work with IE6 work with IE7 !

Re:Just Like Before

[teh moges]

The problem I have with this (and a lot of other people) is that standards isn't the default behavior. I personally would prefer IE8 to be standards first, with a button hidden down the bottom that can change the rendering mode.
Example:
- I view website1, which is standards compliant. It works
- I visit website2, which was hacked to work in IE6. It doesn't look right. IE8 recognizes certain elements of the HTML code (such as overuse of tables or 1x1 pixel images) and a balloon pops up "If this website doesn't look right, please click here to try another rendering option" (of course, a more user-friendly message would appear). I click the button, it switches to IE6 mode and the website works. The website is added to a list and in future always displays in IE6 mode.
- I visit website3, which contains poorly built HTML. IE8 recognizes this and the same balloon pops up.

It is win-win. IE looks all smart by being able to display anything (which would be great advertising) and they actually FIX the problem by encouraging future websites to follow standards, which benefits everyone. If IE8 comes out and still defaults to IE6-first-mode, then it can be seen as being obvious that they are really pushing their own agenda here.

Re:Just Like Before

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but why isn't this "Redudant tag" just the doctype? After all the doctype is supposed to define wich standard the webpage was coded towards, and not many broken pages that run only in IE6 are tagged html 4 strict, and if they are, well then it's the webdeveloper whos stupid for stating that his page complies to a standard that it doesn't complie to.
We don't need more tags, they are already there.....

Re:Just Like Before

[Jorgensen]

I agree. That is what they should do.

But they won't. Why? Because improving cross-browser compatibility is bad for Microsoft (the very thought of making it possible for customers to escape vendor lock-in is the epitome of heresy!), despite it being good for the world in general.

Since this is a decision that Microsoft has to take (it's their product after all), the outcome should not really surprise anybody: They'll always do what's best for them, regardless of the consequences for others. Nothing new here.

Re:Just Like Before

[IntlHarvester]

I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.

Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.

It doesn't make any sense, because webdevs already have to fix their pages for IE7, and likely means that the standards improvements in IE8 will just be ignored.

Furthermore, they already have a way of handing this, the IF IE comment tag.

Re:Just Like Before

[dedazo]

Yes, this a great idea someone mentioned. I think it would work beautifully.

Re:Just Like Before

[RightSaidFred99]

Fortunately nobody cares what you want. You aren't one of the thousands of businesses who would be affected because "Joe Asshole" wants to be standards compliant, come what may to everyone else! See, in the real world money, time, and effort is far more important than ridiculous ideals of "standards" (really just your competitors ganging up and defining stuff to screw you over).

Re:Just Like Before

[bandannarama]

Agreed on all points.

It's useful to understand the way large software companies think about this kind of problem space (I work at one, 5000 employees, Microsoft partner). The forward-compatibility problem is highly significant throughout any long-lived software project. There is a standing requirement from customers that stuff does not break when you release a new version. If you think this is a problem, blame the customer, not the vendor. Blaming the vendor is like blaming a retailer for raising prices when sales tax goes up - you're looking at the symptom, not the problem.

Given this, we (large ISVs) pay very serious attention to versioning and compatibility. If designed well from the outset, a robust versioning system from can make life much easier for both users and developers. Basically you have to allow customers to install your new version (so they get security and stability fixes) and then opt-in to your new systems and features, either via licensing or configuration.

The compatibility story for the web is actually pretty fragile. If you accept that change can and will happen, i.e. that the technological needs of the HTML-based web will change, i.e. that it's not fair to ask the W3C to foresee everything, then you have to accept that versioning is needed. META is the main way to handle safe versioning, in practice. An opt-in META tag that says "I want this document rendered as ACID2 compliant, please disable your workarounds for past non-ACID2 transgressions" would be completely sensible. It would be much better than a solution that said "Render for IE8 plz kthx"

Consider an alternative path: IE8 or Firefox drops support for everything except ACID2 rendering. That browser's market share would drop precipitously overnight. Why? Because the customers wouldn't stand for it. The problem lies in the mirror, not in Redmond.

Thinking ahead, I could see IE9 making the ACID2 render path the default. So in a weird way this could be a blessing in disguise since it would enable content authors to safely target ACID2.

-B

Re:Just Like Before

[teh moges]

My bad, must of missed that comment.

Re:Just Like Before

[amRadioHed]

From the blog comments in the article:

@sami, @kimblin, @ruemere, @Webdesign, et al - any method that requires end users to switch between modes to get the page to "work right" is broken. Most users don't know about quirks mode, and don't (and shouldn't) need to care. Of course his mistake is in ignoring the fact that IE is broken either way, it doesn't matter if the user knows it or not.

Re:Just Like Before

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be an asshat.

Those thousands of businesses have nobody to blame but themselves for cutting corners by not following standards that have just passed their tenth birthday. Most business-oriented websites have probably gone through at least two redevelopments since the html 4.01, xhtml 1.0 and css 2 standards were released.

Re:Just Like Before

[TheMCP]

Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.

So, while I'm no fan of IE, I'm kinda baffled by your remark. My browser side code, which is some of the most complex I've ever seen, transitioned flawlessly from IE6 to IE7. I was stunned; I put aside a whole week just for tracking down the inevitable bugs that would crop up from the new browser, but I had zero bugs to fix and didn't have to change a single line of code. I haven't found any real improvements in IE7, but I didn't notice anything suddenly failing to work.

Can you elaborate on what, specifically, they broke?

Re:Just Like Before

[BeanThere]

Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds?

For the foreseeable future, you're going to have to spend all your time hacking workarounds *anyway*, because IE6 and 7 are going to be around for a long time to come. Maybe five or ten years ago it'll start helping us move to standards, but until then you're still going to have to create both a standards-based version and a Microsoft-IE-6-and-7-based version. I'm sure MS could help this change along a lot faster if they wanted, but obviously that's not in their interests.

Re:Just Like Before

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I'm actually not sure personally; but I am sure that most large corporations have not upgraded to IE7 yet. A deciding factor for those who have consider upgrading is whether their applications continue to work under IE7. When an upgrade comes out, many man-years of testing has to go into by the large companies, before they roll it out internally.

I'm not saying that corporations won't ever upgrade - but I am saying that they , as the entities with the biggest wallets, will influence Microsoft to whatever extent is possible to ensure that when they do have to upgrade, it's as smooth as possible. And ... as we can see, it works.

Re:Just Like Before

[westlake]

but if a browser doesn't work due to actually being non-standard, I want that to be Not My Problem

If the non-standard browser has 80% of your employer's target audience then it becomes your problem whether you want it or not.

Re:Just Like Before

[tepples]

No one's forcing you to support internet explorer. Are an estimated 80 percent of your customers "no one"?

Re:Just Like Before

[atamido]

For us, it was layout things that broke. IE7 completely changed the way that fieldset/legend is displayed (as well as little bits of forms), and there didn't seem to be a way to revert so we just made it look as best we could. There is also a table on every page that went all wacky. The way to fix the table was to add this line of CSS in every page:
TABLE {MARGIN-TOP: auto; MARGIN-TOP: 1px; MARGIN-TOP: auto; }

Yes, obviously it should do nothing, but for whatever reason it fixes the bug in IE7. There were also a lot of little places where it suddenly added a line or two of space on either the top/bottom/left/right.

The webpages were originally all coded for Firefox, and then had small additions made to make it render correctly in IE5/6. Other browsers all rendered correctly initially.

Re:Just Like Before

[arotenbe]

The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. I agree. I was actually thinking that the correct thing for Microsoft to do in this situation would be to drop IE entirely (except for a backwards-compatible rendering mode) and release IE 8 under a new name and identification. That would solve all of their problems and not break anything ... except the brand perception. Of course, the MS marketing department would never allow it.

Re:Just Like Before

[Arthur B.]

Your customers aren't forcing you to do anything.

Re:Just Like Before

[godless dave]

Why the hell did that get modded "insightful"?

ridiculous ideals of "standards" (really just your competitors ganging up and defining stuff to screw you over).

Is that really what you think standards are? Remember, Microsoft is a member of the organization that defined the standards! They aren't a secret and they weren't designed by Micrsoft's competitors. Compliance to standards would make it easier, faster and cheaper to do web development; it would be good for business.

Re:Just Like Before

[tepples]

No one's forcing you to support internet explorer. Are an estimated 80 percent of your customers "no one"? Your customers aren't forcing you to do anything. Your shareholders force you to do what it takes to stay in business. This might mean not turning away users of some Microsoft products.

Re:Just Like Before

[Arthur B.]

Sorry but your shareholders don't force you to do anything either.

Re:Just Like Before

[IntlHarvester]

Many of the well-known CSS-P bugs in IE6, or more specifically the work-arounds for them fail spectacularly in IE7. You wouldn't probably wouldn't see this unless you used a complex CSS layout.

I had an extensive IE6.css hack file which I almost entirely eliminated for IE7. Plus things like transparent PNG javascripts etc.

Re:Just Like Before

[tepples]

Sorry but your shareholders don't force you to do anything either.

The government can force you to pay damages if the shareholders successfully sue you for failing to turn a profit due to failing to accommodate 80 percent of your market.

I think the underlying part of this thread is a Layne's Law dispute over the definition of "to force".

Re:Just Like Before

[Arthur B.]

That would just be contract enforcement between you and your shareholder.

Re:Just Like Before

[tepples]

That would just be contract enforcement between you and your shareholder. So I take it your thesis is "Nobody forces you to stay in business". But without staying in business, I cannot feed my family. "Nobody forces you to feed your family"? The government does, by enforcing spousal and child neglect laws.

Re:Just Like Before

[Arthur B.]

This is correct. You'll admit it's a long shot from "microsoft is tha evil monopoly it forces me to support buggy software". Besides Microsoft cannot not be held responsible for the government's actions.

Re:Just Like Before

[sekhmet486]

I may not be a savy web developer but I don't really see this as being a better solution. The current userAgent string for Internet Explorer clearly specifies that I'm running IE7, so that would mean that it's the websites way of identifying the browser that is incorrect. So changing the userAgent to specify that the browser is MSWB and not MSIE would simply be another hack.

I agree that adding a new meta-tag isn't a good/better solution, I'm just saying that your suggestion isn't that much better.

Re:Just Like Before

[dedazo]

Wow, troll. I guess I'm not trying hard enough here.

Did I catch that right?

[zappepcs]

So, to get IE8 to behave nice, web developers are responsible? huh?

Re:Did I catch that right?

[jessiej]

Since acid tests how web browsers deal with faulty code, and IE8 only passes acid3 if the developer includes a specific meta tag. So how likely is that the developers who are creating faulty code and not testing it will actually know to include the meta tag? There must be a major drawback of using the acid3 compliant mode that we don't know about yet.

Re:Did I catch that right?

[scoot80]

Developers that create faulty code and don't test it shouldn't be developers...

Re:Did I catch that right?

[mr_mischief]

I believe jessiej meant, "and only testing in standards-compliant browsers and not in IE". The whole idea of standards compliance is that once the browsers are compliant any code that does the right thing in one standards-compliant browser works the same elsewhere.

Requiring a non-standard tag to be part of a standards-compliant page isn't standards-compliant. The standards says nothing about adding tags that aren't part of the standards. How could they?

The real fix here would be for MS to either: support IE 6 in making it standards compliant or report to its customers that it is not standards compliant and that pages written for it are not either. Maybe a good work-around for people who broke their sites by writing to IE 6 would be to add a tag that says to use IE 6's render mode. IT shouldn't be the people following the standards who have to make the change.

What MS is counting on two things with this botch. One is that it's the people who didn't care if anything but IE 6 worked who won't be bothered to update anything. The other is that people who cared enough about standards and cross-browser compatibility to do extra work then will care enough about IE 8 now to do a little extra.

Re:Did I catch that right?

[Blakey Rat]

Consider that approximately 80% of web developers don't know what doctype switching is and how or why to use it. Further consider that these web developers frequently create pages that:
1) Have a HTML/xhtml strict doctype, but use tags banned in strict mode (for example, IE6-only tags)
2) Are perfectly compliant HTML/xhtml, but have no doctype at all

What this flag is is a, "I know what strict mode in browsers is" flag. If you set it, IE8 will honor your actual doctype definition and know that you're not one of those idiots mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you set this mode, you're telling IE's rendering engine that you're smart enough to know how to write a standards compliant website, so IE can trust the doctype you set.

Re:Did I catch that right?

[Sancho]

There are some semantic issues with your post.

IE8 will require a non-standard tag in order to render the page in a standards-compliant way. The page itself is still standards-compliant, and in fact, the extra information the meta-element should be ignored by standards-compliant browsers. It's a hack, but since that's the way browsers are supposed to behave, it's ok. I can make up all sorts of tags and create a browser that understands them, and as long as my browser also understands the standards and renders them correctly, it's still a standards-compliant browser. It's embracing and extending, and that's not necessarily bad.

What this ultimately means is that IE8 won't be standards-compliant, however web developers will be able to force it into standards-compliant mode on a per-page basis.

Maybe a good work-around for people who broke their sites by writing to IE 6 would be to add a tag that says to use IE 6's render mode. IT shouldn't be the people following the standards who have to make the change. Except that there are a lot of unmaintained pages out there. Microsoft wants to maintain compatibility. They don't want thousands of web developers to wake up one morning and find that half of their userbase can't use their websites because of an Internet Explorer upgrade, and they can't count on users upgrading to the new version of the browser.

Re:Did I catch that right?

[mr_mischief]

"There are some semantic issues with your post."

That word... I do not think it means what you think it means.

"I can make up all sorts of tags and create a browser that understands them, and as long as my browser also understands the standards and renders them correctly, it's still a standards-compliant browser."

No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a nonstandard tag.

"Except that there are a lot of unmaintained pages out there. Microsoft wants to maintain compatibility. They don't want thousands of web developers to wake up one morning and find that half of their userbase can't use their websites because of an Internet Explorer upgrade, and they can't count on users upgrading to the new version of the browser."

Microsoft stopped supporting IE 6 as a product months ago. They might still offer major security fixes for it, but it's not seeing any upgrades. They'll stop supporting XP soon and Vista comes with IE 7. The best way to thin the herd of so-called web developers who never saw a standard is to have their pages stop working. That way, maybe their customers will assure that those so-called web developers also stop working. There sure isn't exactly a shortage of people who mistakenly think they know HTML from their asses, and real web developers would love to get the business those people get. If someone does a half-ass job and the result is a half-ass web page, they deserve to lose.

Re:Did I catch that right?

[mr_mischief]

That second response should read:

No. It is not a standards-compliant browser. A standards compliant browser would render according to the standards based on the standardized information. You could have a standards-compliant browser that also did something non-standard based on the presence of a non-standard tag. You cannot have a standards-compliant browser that fails to comply with the standard based on the absence of a non-standard tag.

let me see if I get this ...

[kharchenko]

to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?

Re:let me see if I get this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah what the fuck is this META bullshit? I have never seen a META tag before. There goes Microsoft using imaginary HTML tags.

Re:let me see if I get this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I would like to see developers who shortsightedly developed for a specific browser be punished by having to go back and include a "render in the old broken format" tag in every page instead.

Re:let me see if I get this ...

[_xeno_]

I know that was a joke, but the answer is no, it uses a standard HTML tag.

Which is used to add a non-standard HTTP header, "X-UA-Compatible". Standard HTML, non-standard HTTP.

Which leads to the great possibility of a webpage looking different on the local computer compared to the server it was originally downloaded from...

Re:let me see if I get this ...

[Tumbleweed]

to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?

Indeed. You have achieved Microsoft Zen(tm).

Would you like to verify that your MS Zen product license is genuine?

Re:let me see if I get this ...

[tobiasly]

to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?

You don't have to include the tag. You can use a server-side user-agent browser sniffing check to see whether or not to include the IE-specific meta tag hack!

Of course, the really funny part is that the whole reason they're doing this is that too many people misused the DOCTYPE declaration in the first place -- declaring that their pages should use Strict rendering when in fact they used the old IE6 hacks. So who wants to bet that MS will need to introduce another browser hack for IE9 because too many web developers set this new hack to "IE=edge" or whatever to be "future-proof"?

As they say, make something idiot-proof, and the universe will just invent better idiots. The only problem is that MS feels the compelling urge to cater to these new, improved, uber-idiots.

Makes Sense

[DigitalisAkujin]

This move makes sense but I wish they would stop making up random tricks like that whenever they damn well please. HTML 5 has a way to set render modes while being compliant.

At least their decision isn't going to mess with any other browsers.

Re:Makes Sense

[cheater512]

It only makes sense for Microsoft. It wont help any other browser which is the whole point of standards.

Only people who care will put the meta tag on.
Everyone else will do what they have always done and ignore the standards completely.

Re:Makes Sense

[Pulzar]

Everyone else will do what they have always done and ignore the standards completely.

Anybody know looks and their logs and sees 20-30% of visitors using Firefox will not "do what they have always done". They are probably writing standard code for Firefox already, and adding hacks for IE6. Now, then can just add one tag (call it a hack if you will), and the standard code will work with both Firefox and IE8. It makes their lives easier, and therefore they will probably end up writing standard code from now on.

I think this is a good thing. You can't really expect every page out there to be updated to standard code, but you can at least encourage that all *new* code is standard. I think that's good enough, considering the pickle we're in at the moment.

Re:Makes Sense

[DigitalisAkujin]

If you're a 'good' web designer you design for all browsers. Not just the ones that have more then 10% of market share.

Also, the reason I said it won't effect other browsers is because meta tags are harmless and are meant to be made up.

However, I still find it to be "hackish". Still, it makes sense for those few simple reasons.

Re:Makes Sense

[cheater512]

Yeah ok granted the situation is improving when it comes to web developers who care, but this meta tag does nothing to solve the problem of idiots deciding that it renders in IE so its good enough for everyone.

There really needs to be a firm incentive for IE developers (shudder) to make their sites compliant.
Then quirks mode can be ditched completely.

This meta tag makes it slightly easier for good web developers once everyone is using IE 8.
From the takeup of IE 7, it will be a very long time until people can really use it however.

Re:Makes Sense

[Pulzar]

Anybody know looks and their logs..

That was supposed to be:

Anybody who looks at their logs...

I amaze myself sometimes.

Re:Makes Sense

[Pulzar]

but this meta tag does nothing to solve the problem of idiots deciding that it renders in IE so its good enough for everyone.

True. But Firefox is solving that problem by gaining so much market penetration. When a site doesn't work in Firefox, I go somewhere else. When 20-30% of your customers/visitors do the same, they will notice...

The situation is already dramatically better now than it was a couple of years ago. I very rarely run into any sites these days that don't render properly in Firefox, and they are usually some little moms and pops online stores or a personal blog.

Re:Makes Sense

[dotancohen]

At least their decision isn't going to mess with any other browsers. Yes, it will, that's probably the whole idea. Webdezinerz will _still_ code for IE6, knowing that IE6 code displays fine in IE>=6. MS can claim standards compliance, yet _still_ encourage the development of sites that don't work in any other browser. Brilliant.

Added bonus: having 3 rendering engines means that users need ++proccessor and ++memory upgrades. The hardware manufacturers will love MS, and will thank MS back by making sure that their products encourage the use of MS software (read: don't provide linux drivers).

Yes, Microsoft is trying to eat it's own dogfood

[JackHoffman]

Broken IE6 websites can't tell IE7 from the browser that they were so foolishly designed for, so they try to use all the non-standard stuff in IE7 which the new browser can't support without turning back into the mess that IE6 was. What to do? Make browser-dependence part of the standard...

A good first step

[gihan_ripper]

This sounds great, but it still means that everyone will have to write slightly different code for interoperability with IE, even if it only involves an additional meta tag. Hopefully, when HTML 5 comes out, the additional meta tag won't be necessary, with the assumption that all HTML 5 web pages will be developed with IE 8 (or another standards-compliant browser) in mind.

OOXMLish

[bigdavex]

sigh.

<render-like-IE6>

Re:OOXMLish

[bigdavex]

Even worse, I guess, it's really:

<render-not-like-IE6>

Re:OOXMLish

[ikkonoishi]

</render-like-IE6>

Hey don't leave a dangerous tag like that open.

Re:OOXMLish

[Jugalator]

Tags like those have to be wonderful for people trying to implement their document format. ;-)

"Oh and to implement this tag properly, we need to know the history of all IE 6 flaws that developed over the history of the browser -- no big deal!"

Credit where credit is [somewhat] due...

[Nemilar]

I've been developing web pages for more years than I can count, and I (like everyone else in the field) know the annoyances of Internet Explorer. Everything from their faulty implementation of the box model to their poor handling of Javascript has done an unimaginable amount of good for the stock prices of the asprin (and beer) industry.

That being said, IE has come a long was since the days of version 6 (those that came before version 6 are unmentionable), and some credit has to be given to Microsoft for finally trying to do something about their browser. Seeing as how it is the de-facto standard, it's good that they're putting at least some effort into making it better.

I love Firefox, and I love that Mozilla is the reason why Microsoft is being forced to update their browser (competition is everything), but we're going to be stuck with Internet Explorer for the foreseeable future, and progress can only be a good thing.

Re:Credit where credit is [somewhat] due...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been developing web pages for more years than I can count... Yeah, I know a lot of web developers who can't count either.

Re:Credit where credit is [somewhat] due...

[Blakey Rat]

The biggest problem IE has with the box model is that it renders elements in the way that makes logical sense to everybody on earth instead of the weird-ass backwards and confusing way the CSS spec wants it to work. Unlike most of Slashdot, I don't think Microsoft did anything purposefully malicious, I just think web standards have been, historically, flaming piles of shit that were impossible for *anybody* to understand and implement. And since they were "recommended" and not "required", there was no penalty for not doing them right except having some shrill Linux users scream at you, so why bother?

Now that the specs are actually "required," now that we have doctype switching which at least pretends to be some kind of version awareness, things are much better for everyone involved. Could Microsoft have updated IE sooner? Of course.

But it would make the world even better still if Firefox would actually throw the web a damned bone sometimes and implement "innerText", or get rid of empty pointless text nodes in the DOM, or start using OBJECT tags for Flash, or fixing any of the umpteen small ways it's incompatible with IE for no reason whatsoever.

Re:Credit where credit is [somewhat] due...

[Tribbin]

"and progress can only be a good thing"

Isn't that sort of the definition of progress?

progress
n 1: gradual improvement or growth or development; "advancement of knowledge"; "great progress in the arts" [syn: advancement]

3 modes are: Quirks, standards, & super standa

[denis-The-menace]

1. "Quirks mode" remains the same, and compatible with current content.
      2. "Standards mode" remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
      3. ["super standards"], you []get it by inserting a simple element.

Why to do have to add a tag to "say" it's standard.
Change the name of mode 2 to "Almost standard" and get people to use that tag there!

I, for one, welcome...

[rattlesoft]

I, for one, welcome our new standards complaint Internet Explorer overlords.

On a serious note, it makes some sense why they require you to opt-in. Reason being, that alot of websites are designed to "hack" Internet Explorer to look right and forcing all of those sites to be updated to the new standards will take time.

It's easier to force all new websites or updated websites opt-in rather than forcing ALL websites to update to the new Internet Explorer.

Re:I, for one, welcome...

[Anonymous Coward]

what should have happened is either 1) drop the garbage IE6 hand holding entirely [no more catering to IE6 ever again] or 2) tag non-compliant pages with the tag [easier than rewriting the whole page] either way this garbage should never ever have been tolerated. just because IE isn't going to support the standards doesn't mean any of us should have to bend over backwards to clean up its messes.

Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[JonTurner]

Now's as good a time as any to check for browser type. If IE, redirect to the "You are using an non-standard browser" page with a link to GetFirefox.com

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[Anonymous Coward]

I get that a lot actually.

Unfortunately, I get it when I'm using iceweasel.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[ianare]

I've had that problem with Scalix and iceweasel. See here for the fix.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[chaeron]

Brilliant suggestion. I vote for this approach.

We don't need no steenkin' special tags from Microsoft.

And can we rename the new browser IH8IE?

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[Tribbin]

I had that set up some years ago.

People though; ey, an error; and clicked the screen away and never saw my website.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be the same asshole who has the problem with "Designed for MSIE only" websites, now suggesting a "Designed for Firefox only" redirect to their download page ???

Me, I prefer a browser that DOESN't run as slow as a dead turtle when the page has more than 1 image on it, and DOESN't leak memory to the extent it's using 146 MB after 10 minutes. So f**k you and your redirects.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[tepples]

Me, I prefer a browser that DOESN't run as slow as a dead turtle Opera. Wii all love it.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on slashdot would that be 'insightful.' Sheesh, not everyone can choose what browser they use.

I am aware the IE6 has glitches. Let me see the glitched site. Don't be so arrogant. Stick a disclaimer in the top if you want, but frankly, arrogant nerds like you give open source a bad name.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do a browser detect with page redirection to a "Your browser is not CSS compliant. Engaging basic visual mode." and then I auto-redirect them to ieindex.php after 2 seconds. I hope IE users can read all those big words that fast. I may have to rethink that time.

I don't advertise FF or any other browser on the redirect page. Maybe I should? Any thoughts on that?

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[dotancohen]

Like the site in my sig does? (Disclaimer: I own it)

The web was invented in 1989

[p3d0]

I've been developing web pages for more years than I can count You can't count up to 19?

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[Tumbleweed]

> I've been developing web pages for more years than I can count

You can't count up to 19?

I'm pretty sure that in the web, you have to count in hex. :)

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[pizzach]

Relax. He is probably already 30 and with 19 years of web development is already going senile. Just let him stay in his corner.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[Anonymous Coward]

He's like Ricky Bobby; he can only count to #1.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried, but I had an accident when I was a kid where I lost two fingers.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably means that he's been creating page styles for myspace; which inevitably means he's only 3 years old and hasn't started school and thus, learned to count yet.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[jonadab]

Maybe he means that he can't count how many years he's been doing web development, because he wasn't old enough to read a calendar yet when he started. If he's, say, twenty years old now, and his dad was doing research at MIT when he was a wee lad, I guess it's conceivable that he could have been introduced to web development (such as it was at the time) along with the alphabet, when he was two or three, and not learned to read a calendar or count years until later.

In fact, I can just imagine some geek professor teaching his son:
Dad: What's this letter?
Son: Pee.
Dad: Good! What sound does it make?
Son: puh. puh. puh.
Dad: Good! And what does the <p> tag do in a web page?
Son: It jumps down and writes in a new place.
Dad: What do we call the new place?
Son: A pagaf.
Dad: PaRAgraph. Say Ruh, ruh, ruh, PaRUHgraph.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[dotancohen]

You can't count up to 19? He's probably missing two toes.

Re:The web was invented in 1989

[Kitanin]

Well, they did say they were a web developer. =)

http-equiv

[Bogtha]

I'm just glad that they actually recognise real HTTP headers. I've complained in the past about the fact that Microsoft seemingly ignores the fact that http-equiv is only a poor workaround for web developers that can't transmit headers properly, and real HTTP headers are the proper way of doing it.

I'm happy they incorporated this mechanism instead of further extending doctype switching, which was just a poor hack that has caused all sorts of problems in the years since it was first introduced. I suggested a mechanism similar to the one they will use in Internet Explorer 8 years ago, I could never understand why this wasn't introduced sooner.

Re:http-equiv

[WebmasterNeal]

A lot of people don't like "doctype switching", and somebody suggested using a meta element to determine which rendering mode to use. No doubt you think that this will be too prone to regressions and incompatibilities with existing documents. So have an "X-Internet-Explorer-Standards: true" HTTP header that can also be put in a meta element. That way, I can update a single configuration file, and invoke the standards mode across all our servers at once, for all our documents. It's also standards-compliant, implementable by people who don't have any control over their server, and will not affect any existing documents, so it's perfectly backwards-compatible. Damn, you predicted this almost 4 years ago.

My Suggested Meta Tag

[pergamon]

/>

Re:My Suggested Meta Tag

[Anonymous Coward]

<meta http-equiv="work-right" content="mostly" />

Re:My Suggested Meta Tag

[tobiasly]

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-ActMoreLike" content="FireFox" /> Depends on whether you're delivering via HTML or XHTML. The latter, being case-sensitive, won't know that "FireFox" should be "Firefox".

Re:My Suggested Meta Tag

[pergamon]

Indeed. Oops.

Re:My Suggested Meta Tag

[msuarezalvarez]

XHTML is not case-sensitive about the content of attributes... In fact, that statement makes very little sense.

It would make more sense...

[TheOnlyJuztyn]

... to have the special meta tag required to get the page to render in IE6/7's "Standards" mode.

Re:It would make more sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

How would that work, all old pages would need to be retrofitted with a new tag to keep working. It's a hell of a lot easier to have NEW pages to add a single Meta-Tag indicating such. This is the method of least impact to existing content.

Re:It would make more sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

But the point is that IE6/7 aren't going to be looking for those tags in the first place. So for backwards compatibility it *has* to be an IE8 opt-in tag.

I'm not too fond of it either, but really adding one specific tag is much nicer than having to add a mess of hacky CSS workarounds.

Re:It would make more sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

All you people that are saying this really aren't thinking... It's much easier for a "new" site to add the tag to say it is compliant, than to go back to potentially thousands (hundreds of thousands) of sites and add a tag to say it's not compliant.

Whether you like it or not, the web is what it is, and the "norm" is non-compliance. So it makes complete sense that they default to non-compliance rendering over compliant rendering

Re:It would make more sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Billions of pages just wouldn't get updated with the new tag.

Re:It would make more sense...

[msuarezalvarez]

And yet the other browsers seem to do quite fine without any idiotic tags linking pages to specific rendering engines, no?

The meta tag should be renamed X-WeRecognizeWeAreIncapableOfDoingThisCorrectly.

How could it have passed Acid2?

[Len]

There's some kinda BS somewhere...

However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here.

So how could IE8 possibly have passed the Acid2 test? The test page doesn't contain the magic META tag that IE needs to pass the test!

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Moskie]

They probably ran a closed test that used (forced) this third render mode on the HTML.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[pimpimpim]

You should take the acid, too.

Then it works perfectly, it's all explained in the name of the test ;)

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Chris_Jefferson]

Your webserver can add the HTML header line:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=8

and then IE8 will use this mode. I suspect they put Acid2 on a webserver that always returns this line. Once IE8 comes out and assuming (big assumption) their standards-compliant rendering really is good, I'm sure I'll drop the same line into my Apache config and get nice standards rendering. You can even use:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge

To always get the most recent rendering engine.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

The quote specifically says 'This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid2 test..'.

In other words, when IE is running in this standards mode, it can pass Acid2. And I'm pretty sure the IE developers can programmatically enable it for testing. They could even enable it and then browse to sites like, oh, I don't know... the Acid2 test? The fact that you need a META tag to run IE in standards mode doesn't mean that standards mode can't pass Acid2.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[ragefan]

There's some kinda BS somewhere...

However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here.

So how could IE8 possibly have passed the Acid2 test? The test page doesn't contain the magic META tag that IE needs to pass the test!

It could be that the "tag" is the code from the Acid2 test.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy: special-case the test URL.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? Really?

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[TwilightSentry]

if ( page_contents == ACID2_PAGE )
          render_proper_acid_2();
else
          render_page( page_contents );

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be obtuse; the proposed meta tag will go in the release version of IE8.

Since they have the source code Microsoft is free to make as many private builds of IE8 (that ignore or follow such meta tags) as they like.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[eledu81]

Hopefully there will be an option to set the default mode..

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[msuarezalvarez]

You can even use:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge

To always get the most recent rendering engine.

To do that and to ensure that they'llneed to come up with some other great idea (TM) when IE9 is out...

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[HannethCom]

Or maybe they did what Opera originally did to pass ACID1. They modified the source. The first version of Opera to pass ACID would only work on their specially crafted ACID page because it didn't like px after the number when specifying the number of pixels. Of course it might also just look for ACID in the title and if it sees it, it goes into IE8 actual standards rendering mode. *Can just imagine every web site having ACID in their title from now on out*

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[motokochan]

I'm guessing they either forced the mode (maybe via a setting) or tested before they implemented this method of switching engines.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine that they enabled "Super Duper Standards Mode" for the browser then visited the page. As I understand it, you can manually set your browser to render in "Super Duper Standards Mode" at which point it will pass the test.

As far as I can tell this tag is a good thing. Sadly, if your trying to make money your page needs to render correctly in IE. Macho (if being a geek can be macho) posturing about not being a slave to the monopoly will not make you popular with clients who want to make money, not start a revolution for the good of technology. All of the nasty hacks and bad design forced upon you (or me at least) by Microsoft's will be reduced to one non-standard tag.

I think every web developer has wished for the tag. Now we have it.

Then again, if they broke all of the websites that have been specifically hacked together to render properly in the most popular browser I'd have a hell of a lot more work.

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

You (and the other flame-happy posters) are seriously missing the point here.

When Microsoft made IE7, it originally was a lot more standards-compliant than what was eventually released. The problem was that websites was DESIGNED AROUND IE6 (and lower) bugs, yet included the standard DOCTYPE declaration. So, as much as 40% of the current webscape would have to be remade if IE7 was made compliant, and nobody wanted that.

Enter IE8. You can now specify which version of the engine you want the page to be rendered with. if you OMIT this meta tag, it will render compliant pages (IE the acid test, which has no such tag) in compliant mode. If however your page was built using the quirksmode of IE6, you can simply smack in a meta tag (or do it server wide in apache or whatever) and voila, everything renders the same way as it always has.

Look forward and imagine the exact same scenario happening with IE9, IE10, FF3 and so on. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE BUGS, and developers will work around those. Only, they no longer have to worry about pages breaking when the bugs are fixed in a new edition of the browser. Simply tell them to use the engine you wrote the page for, and then when the users have all migrated and you do a major overhaul / upgrade, you make it for a newer engine.

There. This has been known for months and months now by anyone who actively follows html/css development. I'm going to venture out on a limb and offer a guess here: The gut-reaction-posters have no idea what they are responding to, and are "enthusiastic amateurs".

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

It did not. It did pass Acid2+ test - that is Acid2 with additional IE8 support (generously contributed by Microsoft) :)

Re:How could it have passed Acid2?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be sure to combine it with MS=sucks, like

X-UA-Compatible: IE=8,MS=sucks

(just to test parsing of the header, of course)

Jump when MS says JUMP motherfucka!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Mr Gates et al, I would be happy to insert this tag into my ... code.

javascript compatibility

[sentientbrendan]

Since this new tag lets them safely break compatibility with the old IE, are they going to fix longstanding javascript issues like moving to the standard event model?

It would be nice to be able to write javascript without a bunch of compatibility hacks; however, the IE team hasn't shown much interest in javascript compatibility in the past and instead has focussed on CSS compatibility. CSS is also an important area, but it alone won't allow for hack free coding.

As it stands there's a lot of incentive to move to a different platform, such as flash or silverlight.

Re:javascript compatibility

[snoyberg]

I'll admit I haven't done a huge amount of javascript coding, but from what I have done, it seems that intermediate libraries (like jQuery) really abstract away all those issues. I know from (painful) experience that there is no such possibility with CSS. However, please let me know if the former statement is not true, I'd be very interested.

Re:javascript compatibility

[Tumbleweed]

http://prototypejs.org/

http://prototypejs.org/

Re:3 modes are: Quirks, standards, & super sta

[SickHumour]

Why to do have to add a tag to "say" it's standard.

That way IE knows whether or not you're trying to render the Acid 2 test. :P

Wait..

[nick.ian.k]

For a good long while, Microsoft's official solution to the "things render correct in other browsers but not in IE" has been to use conditional comments. While still a bigger pain in the ass than it should be, using conditional comments has allowed a fair deal of flexibility, even with the release of IE7 - specify a separate stylesheet containing styling fixes for IE6 and below, then a stylesheet just for IE7, and then don't worry about it. Doing this saved me from having to commit cryptic, hacky work-arounds to memory and worrying about whether the next iteration of IE has the problem that allows the hack to work in the first place fixed, or just broken differently enough to break the hack. Really, it's the next-best solution to standards compliance, as far as markup and CSS-based styling go.

So: what the fuck's the point of this new meta-tag? If we've been fixing for IE the way they've formally suggested over the past few years, the conditional comments for

The only thing that comes to mind is anything developed exclusively for IE. But beyond some strictly-internal stuff on company intranets and the like, what serious professional has been doing that over the past 3-4 years? It's easier to build to known standards and fix for that one product than it is to build to an unknown mangling of standards.

So the only thing that comes to mind: they're looking to roll this out *fast* and provide an optional as opposed to mandated transition. Hopefully those modes supporting the old busted way of doing things will become deprecated after a few releases. Seriously: who *isn't* looking forward to that day when it gets easier?

please kill the tagging beta

[texwtf]

... stupidfucksjustdontgetit (tagging beta)

Is this really helpful to anyone, anyone at all?

Tagging sucks and is also stupid and unhelpful. Can we kill it now, please?

Re:please kill the tagging beta

[miffo.swe]

I love the tags some people make. Most often they give a good picture of whats going on if you combine them. The funny ones like the one you complain about i would hate to go away.

Re:please kill the tagging beta

[SanityInAnarchy]

here. Kill them all you want.

I happen to like them. In any case, on the off-chance that Microsoft is reading this, consider "stupidfucksjustdontgetit" to be feedback. It should be obvious why.

Re:please kill the tagging beta

[Kyokushi]

Hey, tags are awesome! On gloomy and depressing days, all I need is get all headlines tagged 'haha' and my day comes bright again!

as long as they don't touch my <blink> tag

[circletimessquare]

as long as they don't touch my tag, they can do whatever they want

<blink>i heart you</blink> blink tag, no one loves you like i do

The More Things Change...

[Nitroadict]

Should anyone be surprised? Wait a second, here... not just ONE, not just TWO, but ... THREE?! THREE MODES FOR THE PRICE OF ONE?! Sounds like quite a bargain to me. Markup validation? NO PROBLEM! Quirks mode? WE GOT YOU COVERED. What's next? It slices, it dices?

I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself, & neither should you. I Jim Carrey-as-Riddler laughed my ass off knowing full that they would mandate that web designers would have to start using tags that they create in order for anything to be compliant or work in their precious 'browsar'.

MS is already screwing things up; the ACID2 test was just some odd aberration of 2007. I'm just going to sit back and laugh as history repeats itself.

If only Maxthon would refine the Trident engine; the Chinese would make mincemeat of IE.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[rale, the]

Well, for serious developers, it means only having to look at the documentation on the actual standards, rather than scour the web for information detailing every rendering quirk in IE. Not that I'm defending the idea of having to add an extra tag just to make it work right, but if that's the only option, then it beats the alternative of dealing with random-IE-brokeness.

In summary

[red_dragon]

I like to think of the different modes as:

1. Unpolished turd.
2. Brushed turd.
3. Sanded and polished turd with a bit of air freshener and shaped to look like a Hershey bar.

Re:In summary

[jimicus]

Sanded and polished turd with a bit of air freshener and shaped to look like a Hershey bar.

Drifting off topic here, but it probably tastes like a Hershey bar too.

Re:In summary

[Anonymous Coward]

You, Sir, are my hero.

"No one says "turd" anymore, but then, who wants to?"

                                                          -George Carlin

No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Chris_Jefferson]

Microsoft really had 4 options:

1) Don't try to support standards properly.
2) Obey the DOCTYPE, even though many programs and people put it on old pages which aren't going to render properly in a standards-compliant browser
3) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I promise I know about standards".

For years, they have been doing (1). It would be nice if they did (2), and just broke all the badly written IE 6 pages with an improper DOCTYPE. But they aren't going to do that, their users don't want them to do that, and to be honest I don't either. That leaves them with adding a new flag which lets people admit they know about standards.

In their favour, they are:
1) Designing the option in such a way other browsers can be extended by it
2) You can pass it as a HTML header, so if you want just add it to your apache config, and all pages on your website will be rendered in IE8 cleanly (this is the option I intend to take).

Yes, this isn't perfect and it is evil Microsoft, but it's bettered than I'd hoped for. I'm looking forward to popping the option into my apache config and seeing if IE8 really is standards compliant.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[random0xff]

Repeat 3) with new tag for each new version of IE...

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[MightyMartian]

I agree with the sentiment, but we have to live in the real world. IE still holds the dominant position, and is a defacto standard. What would be nice is if Microsoft could even make things work properly between versions. The whole thing is a fucking nightmare, and what makes it worse is the number of crappy little apps that rely on IE, so that you can't even say "Fuck it" and move to Firefox or Safari.

If there's any justice, some day some government will fine Microsoft a hundred trillion dollars, not specifically for being a monopolist, but for being completely incompetent. I think the reason they want to keep their code, protocols and formats a secret is because the real secret is that for all that money, Microsoft may be occupied by the biggest pack of mental retards the world has ever known.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[brentonboy]

You can pass it as a HTML header aka HTTP header? :)

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[lucas teh geek]

Microsoft really had 4 options:

1) Don't try to support standards properly.
2) Obey the DOCTYPE, even though many programs and people put it on old pages which aren't going to render properly in a standards-compliant browser
3) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I promise I know about standards".

you missed the 4th one:
4) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I am an idiot and am purposefully ignoring the standards. please render me with the broken engine".
that way standard compliant sites aren't forced to ugly up their html with tags only honored by MS products

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[gollito]

Microsoft really had 4 options: What was the fourth?

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Anonymous Coward]

New meta-tag? Easy. Just look for this somewhere in a page:
<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Chris_Jefferson]

Woops, missed option 4.

That seems to overlap with 2. The whole problem here is the large number of existing broken pages. People aren't going to go and change them all, they are going to bitch at Microsoft that they broke. Yes, they should have just written standards compliant code in the first place, but Microsoft isn't going to piss off that many customers when they could just work around the problem instead. It simply wouldn't be good business sense. People who know about web standards are going to bitch and complain, but then add the meta tag or HTTP header line. People who don't will carry on with their pages working as before.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Anonymous Coward]

4) ???

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Chris_Jefferson]

Woops, yes.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[spyowl]

Microsoft really had 4 options:

1) Don't try to support standards properly.
2) Obey the DOCTYPE, even though many programs and people put it on old pages which aren't going to render properly in a standards-compliant browser
3) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I promise I know about standards".

Allow me to translate into layman's terms:

We have created a huge shitpile that has attracted flies, cockroaches, and all kinds of insects from all over the place, so we have 4 options:

1) Keep adding more shit to the shitpile.
2) Replace a portion of the shitpile with flowers and beehives - many existing cockroaches and other nasty insects will suffer and may die
3) Lock the garden, allow certain insects to say "Yes, I promise I am a bee" to let them in; while adding more shit to the shitpile and allowing all the shit-eating insects to multiply just as they have been.
4) Ahhhh... ahhhh... ahhhh... we create shitpiles here - we are not expected to be able to count!

It's amusing that all options, except the mysterious option 4, include the shitpile. How about admit your shit stinks, clean it out, and build something correctly for a change? Even with option #2, all that the broken websites would have to do is remove their incorrect DOCTYPE declaration (or replace it with the correct one) before IE8 comes out in 3-4 years - is that really too much to ask? I'm sure website operators/designers/etc. have made more significant changes in their lifetimes to test with and account for changes in behavior with each browser version upgrade.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[choongiri]

2) You can pass it as a HTML header

1. Load website.
2. Header is passed, page is rendered correctly.
3. Save page locally.
4. Load saved page.
5. No header, page is rendered in fubar mode.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[WebmasterNeal]

I haven't seen anybody break the situation down, as nicely as you have. You should re-post this on some web dev blogs. To seem some of the options available, it seems like a good choice in the end.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Baricom]

Microsoft really had 4 options You must be from the Microsoft school of counting. :)

Seriously, though, what Microsoft is proposing is a proprietary extension on top of an open standard. How is this different from ActiveX, JScript, <blink>, <marquee>, SilverLight, and much, much more?

By forcing people to jump through a hoop to make IE happy, web designers are in the same boat we've been in since IE 6 - we expend a relatively small effort to make a page work in every major web browser in the world that obeys standards, and then have to go back and hack our code just to make IE happy. Microsoft still achieves its stranglehold on web design.

Incidentally, I think A List Apart sold out by publishing this alongside the articles that every browser except Internet Explorer lives by. They will, and should, lose a great deal of credibility over publishing proprietary extensions as canon.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Anonymous Coward]

They could use MIME content types to do this. If the page is served as "application/xhtml+xml" it should trigger standards mode.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Chris_Jefferson]

Hmm.. you're right, I hadn't thought of that. So we will have to shove the meta flag in all the pages. Damn.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Chris_Jefferson]

Why not do option #2?

Because most people who do web design don't read slashdot, or the IE8 blog, or A List Apart. Because many of them don't actually even know what a DOCTYPE is, and use GUI HTML editing programs that have been incorrectly putting on the DOCTYPE. Microsoft isn't going to break all their webpages, when it can make those who understand about standards do a small amount of work they are capable of doing.

Should Microsoft annoy and confuse all the non-educated users so that those who really understand standards don't have to put a meta-tag in their pages? In an ideal world yes, but let's be honest, that's not going to happen.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exhibit B: a guy can't count to 3 properly, much less 19. It's an epidemic I tells ya'!

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[dotancohen]

Microsoft really had 4 options: 1) Don't try to support standards properly. 2) Obey the DOCTYPE, even though many programs and people put it on old pages which aren't going to render properly in a standards-compliant browser 3) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I promise I know about standards". I'm certain that those really are the four options as the IE dev team sees it.

Re:No the best, but better than I had hoped for.

[spyowl]

Because most people who do web design don't read slashdot, or the IE8 blog, or A List Apart.

No, they don't. But they sure read when Microsoft has something important to say - like hey, here's IE8 - here's what you have to do to make your website work, or this is the patch you have to apply to your Frontpage to re-do your sorry ass IE-only page/tool.

Anyway, what kind and how many site publishing tools add XHTML 1.0 strict doctype declaration and provide non-strict IE6-only content inside? What percentage of sites are we talking about that were designed using these tools - 0.000012%? And what are these tools? Shouldn't that be looked into and the practice stopped before MS fanboys break out into "OMG if MS does that they'll break the Internets!"

Again, they've broken more horrible things in the past between browser versions - removing an extra line from a file that shouldn't have it in the first place is miniscule compared to other things like CSS and JScript behavior changes.

Making any bigger deal out of this than necessary demonstrates a successful brainwashing attempt from MS - it is what should be expected from them given how they have treated and continue to treat and manipulate standards.

the tag is against Google

[master5o1]

The tag is actually there only to scramble Google's search results.


you don't know, It could be true.

Re:An awful first step

[betterunixthanunix]

What they should do is require the meta tag for nonstandard rendering, and make standard rendering the default. Web developers shouldn't be encouraged to ignore standards.

Articles on the subject

[Jondor]

Maybe this s a good moment to bring up the two articles posted in "a list apart" today. One explaining the idea, the other giving a thoughful comment on the concept. Something missing here up till now.. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets

Mod Parent Up

[brentonboy]

then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[Mr. Underbridge]

then maybe people would actually *notice* that their sites are designed poorly. an easy fix would be available, but perhaps they would be motivated to bring their site up to par.

"Designed poorly" is relative to a perceived aesthetic and standards of which the vast majority of the corporate world doesn't give a shit. If the site works and renders correctly on the browser used by 90% of the planet, then it's not designed poorly and doesn't need fixing. It frustrates people like us who don't use IE, which is why it's important to encourage Firefox use, but I can see why most companies didn't care until recently, if at all.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[brentonboy]

If the site works and renders correctly on the browser used by 90% of the planet, then it's not designed poorly and doesn't need fixing that is true as long as the browser used by 90% of the planet doesn't change. the problem is that it does change. some surveys already give firefox a 30% market share. what happens if everyone starts using opera overnight? and what happens when all the ie6 users upgrade to IE8? IE9? when that happens, i'd like to see you tell the site managers that their site "isn't designed poorly and doesn't need fixing."

Re:Mod Parent Up

[Mr. Underbridge]

that is true as long as the browser used by 90% of the planet doesn't change. the problem is that it does change. some surveys already give firefox a 30% market share. what happens if everyone starts using opera overnight? and what happens when all the ie6 users upgrade to IE8? IE9? when that happens, i'd like to see you tell the site managers that their site "isn't designed poorly and doesn't need fixing."

I'm obviously playing devil's advocate, but as long as IE is the default - and IE is free on Windows, and maintains a fair degree of backwards compatibility - then most pages won't break over the realistic lifespan of that HTML code for most users. So you're right, that does tend to lock out non-IE browsers, but non-IE browsers have only recently become a non-hypothetical situation.

Last I checked, IE still had about 80% overall marketshare, so we're getting to the tipping point of making them care. But it's only now after a lot of FF evangelism. I can understand corporate sites not caring when the non-IE share was under 5%.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[nick.ian.k]

Seriously, where is the benefit to the web devs to turn on this mode?

Gosh, I don't know, being able to save a fuckton of time and effort by writing code to a known and openly-documented standard *and* being able to have things work fairly reliably almost everywhere without having to poke blindly at shit until it works? :P

This always seems to come up, and I'm bewildered by the fact that it does. Here, once again, is the core issue: IE as it stands right now doesn't suck to write code for just because it doesn't follow a particular set of standards, it sucks because there *isn't* a reliable set of standards to use when coding for it. Writing markup etc. for IE isn't a methodical process, but a series of guess-and-test maneuvers and a lot of F5. There's a degree of this to be expected in generating complicated layouts, but it should be towards the end of the process; doing things for IE, this starts way early in the process. It's a time sink. It's akin to, say, getting a kit for building a shed but there not being any instructions -sure you know what a shed looks like, and the pieces themselves -screws, planks of wood, etc. are known to vaguely work in such-and-such a way, and you put it together mostly on trial-and-error, and as long as it stands up and looks approximately correct, it's done. It's stupid, inefficient, and frustrating.

Re:An awful first step

[Pulzar]

That would make a hell of a lot of pages render poorly by default -- some of them long abandoned, yet still providing useful information. This seems like a good compromise that doesn't break any existing pages... yet it still encourages standards-compliance, because with this tag, you can write once for both IE8 and Firefox and have it work in both.

Stan

That META tag is...

[MadMidnightBomber]

Re:That META tag is...

[ProfessionalCookie]

lowercase please ;)

So when they release IE 15

[sholden]

It will have the rendering engines for 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 embedded in it. Along with the javascript engines for them and so on. Just to support all the people forced to use these tags to access features in the meantime...

Sounds wonderful.

Re:So when they release IE 15

[ChrisMounce]

JavaScript 11 programmer wanted. Experience with JS 10 bugs a plus.

Re:So when they release IE 15

[jonadab]

> It will have the rendering engines for 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 embedded in it.

Not in their entirety. Backward compatibility only goes so far.

Consider, for instance, software that was written for Windows 3.1. It was *supposed* to totally work, and in practice usually mostly worked, in Windows 95. Windows 98 didn't mess it up too bad either, apart from some widget and layout issues. But have you tried running it on Windows XP? Haha. Maybe if you install your Windows XP on a FAT32 filesystem, you conceivably might be able to get some of it to sort-of work. With Vista, that's totally not an option, so all the Windows 3.x software will finally be totally unusable. At long last.

Similarly, I would imagine that the broken IE6/7 HTML you see on the web today will mostly work in IE8 and probably in IE9 also, sort of work with some caveats in IE10 and maybe IE11, but by IE12 or so probably not.

Ironically, pages written for and tested in NCSA Mosaic still display fine in IE7 (and in Firefox too as far as that goes), but pages written for IE4 (or Netscape 4 for that matter) not so much. Of course, pages written for Mosaic don't specify anything that a modern web developer would call layout. I mean, you know, they've got paragraph breaks and, well, also they have paragraph breaks. So it's not too hard to get the rendering right.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[orclevegam]

Seriously, where is the benefit to the web devs to turn on this mode? The benefit is in only having to write a web page once, instead of 2 or 3 times to accommodate all the differences in the various browsers. I much rather write one standards compliant web page with one extra meta tag that gets ignored by all the correct browsers, if that means that IE finally does what it's supposed to do. Of course, I also think that IE8 should fail the Acid 2 test, because they shouldn't be allowed to add their magic meta tag to the test file. If it can't pass the test normally, it doesn't count as a pass.

Trying to keep...

[roeland]

You probably meant: "a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards".

Why not create a whitelist for IE6 behaviour?

[denis-The-menace]

Why not create a whitelist for IE6 behaviour?

That way internal ie6 web-apps will work.

Re:Why not create a whitelist for IE6 behaviour?

[dedazo]

That imposes a burden on the company, and that won't fly. Not under the "but we made it standards-compliant" banner. Like I said, in the corporate world no one gives a crap about standards. No one. Why? Because companies standardize on a single browser, and as long as everything works with that then life is good. Even upgrades from IE4->IE5->IE6->IE7 were peanuts in most cases compared to what would happen if IE suddenly decided to try and render every single page as mandated by the W3C.

Guess it's time for a new hard drive.

[lone bear]

Or it will be when this monstrosity comes out. Being kinder than need be, one can expect this to be a whole number multiple in size of IE6 or 7. 3 different incompatible engines!?!? Wow!

Buy your HDD stock now while it's cheap. ;/

People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Futurepower(R)]

So many people think Microsoft is a software company. Actually Microsoft is an abuse company. Sloppy software is just one method Microsoft uses to deliver abuse.

If you want software, choose some other company. If you want abuse, Microsoft is one of the world's larger suppliers of time wasting hassles for technically knowledgeable people.

Billionaires don't need more money. Many billionaires believe they need people to abuse; they want people they think are socially below them. That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior.

My opinion, but in my experience not far wrong.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Thyrteen]

On an OT note, I think business ethics is something that's going to be seeing new light in the close years to come. It's gotten enough attention through scandals like Enron, microsoft's issues, and other unethical behavior. I think in the 90's people started to lose their grip on humanity when doing business, and the shareholders didn't care as much what the company was doing as long as they were making money. Now people are seeing a light where they realize that the two go hand in hand. I think all these big housing corporations going under is all the same boat. I did business with WCI communities for about a year, and they were _awful_ in every regard of business sense. Bad to the customers, the people doing their work, and their own people. I'm glad it's catching up.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your experience with billionaires, I'm guessing, consists of loathing them from a distance while imbuing them with characteristics that enhance your existing opinion and ignoring anything to the contrary.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[ThePromenader]

...and that extra meta tag is just a peevy way of trying to oblige everyone to think "Microsoft! Microsoft! (is everywhere!)". MS and Karl Rove must share the same condescending views on humanity - and of course, even with all their respective faults and failings, think themselves above it - and spend most of (their|other people's) time and money trying to (convince themselves|convey to us) that they weren't at fault - without really saying it. Take this phrase for example:

"IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change." ..."Accurate"!? Not a word I would use to describe that browser's rendering - nor one any decent webmaster would use to describe the same, either. What a load of two-bit high-school lawyer spin - that is supposed to "cover up" six years of complete - and stubborn - failure?

I was initially happy that MS wised up and decided to play straight with their browser - happy FOR them - but now I couldn't give a fuck. Talk about a company wasting a chance at recieving a widespread feeling of goodwill from the thinking community - the first since decades, if ever.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[icepick72]

You lost me when you jumped to slavery. I know we go to great extends to bash M$ but that train of thought just rode off the tracks no matter how many mod points it was given.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Fred_A]

On an OT note, I think business ethics is something that's going to be seeing new light in the close years to come. Right, ethics in business is now so low that it should soon pop out on the other side of the planet into some new bright light (weather permitting). Yay !
Any time now.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[palegray.net]

Um, you've managed to compare Microsoft to slaveowners. While not *completely* out of the realm of imagination, for many of the "enslaved" their condition is actually completely voluntary. There are alternatives; my wife saw Ubuntu, fell in love with it, and refuses to use Windows now. Which is great, because I was able to free up that hard drive space. And she knows virtually nothing about how computers work.

As for this quote:

That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior. Which grade are you in, third or fourth? The awful fact that people could profit from ownership of another human being, much as one might profit from a sled dog, was the reason for slavery, for just about as long as mankind has existed. Was it a horrible institution? Sure. Did the average slaveholder base his practice of slave ownership on some warm fuzzy feeling of "I'm so awesome?" Well, no. Landowners increased their wealth by owning slaves who increased the profits of their business endeavors, not the other way around. By the way, the majority of American slaveholders in the South weren't all that well off by comparison. Why don't you spend a little less time on the heartfelt backyard historical psychoanalysis and a little more working to educate yourself properly?

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[peipas]

Do you repeat yourself a lot?

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[GermanDZ]

Of course that Billionaires don't need more money, but the problem would be if the Billionaries take their feets of the companies (they already have the money) many people will lost almost all the sources of money. People needs the Billionaries money.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[colmore]

Ethics? Is there money in that?

As long as regulation is a bad word, Corporations will only be as ethical as the purchasing public demands. The public is in general too busy with children, work, and life to organize boycotts and follow the business press. Perhaps if the mainstream media reported more on the bad behavior of business, but advertisers have found that doesn't generally catch as many eyeballs, and anyway, who owns the media? A free market with the current corporate structure (which could not exist without forceful government backing) does little for society but maximize production. There is value in that to be sure, but the communities that make up the world need far more out of the powers that affect their lives than just maximized production. I'd be a libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist or whatever) if it was prefaced first by redistributing any wealth held by legal "persons" who do not, in fact, exist. Wealthy individuals can keep their toys.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Sometimes I wish there were a clandestine organisation which systematically murdered unethical businesspeople. It probably wouldn't stem the tide of crappiness very much, but would be quite satisfying just knowing it was happening.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Dancindan84]

Maybe the points are for getting as close to Godwin's law as possible without actually invoking it?

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[TofuMatt]

When people complain about Microsoft and IE, they aren't complaining because they run it, they're complaining because they have to design for it. I am a Mac user since Tiger, and before my Mac days I did not use Internet Explorer. But I've been designing web sites in that time and I can't ignore the huge number of people running Windows/Internet Explorer.

I've switched to non-MS alternatives; what we web designers and developers want to see is MS switch to a way of providing the majority of computer users with a way of accessing the internet that doesn't involve hacks, which is basically what this amounts to being. In IE 6 and IE 7, I wrap special CSS styles in conditional comments; in IE 8, I add a tag to all of my validating pages to say that they're valid. Please, someone, give me the "MS is not totally fucked" side of this argument.

I guess there's always IE 9, but my hopes aren't high...

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[CrossChris]

Ethics? That's just north-east of London!

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except if it was clandestine, you wouldn't know it was happening.

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately part of the responsibility for this lies with the web developers. Specifically the ones who made no provision to update their code prior to the release of IE7 (despite it being in beta for quite a while) and then whined when the new IE broke their hacky sites. This is an attempt to prevent that same backlash when IE8 is released (which is also why they've defaulted it the wrong way around, by forcing the people who do care about standards to add the new tag while those who don't just get the old rendering mode).

Re:People think Microsoft is a software company.

[ThePromenader]

Yep, if they made hackey code, they'd better fix it. If MS really was forward-thinking, they'd target their meta-tag idea to the same, not newly-created pages. The idea of someone working to make a page standards-compliant, testing that page through W3 to prove the same, then having to add a MS tag to each and every page - just for the sake of ONE browser and version - just to state again the same is backwards and ridiculous.

Re:DAMN YOU, MIKKKR0$$$L0TH!!!!1!!

[Columcille]

Sounds +1 insightful to me.

5-years to ruin a standard

[Anonymous Coward]

"IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change."

So, by ignoring DOCTYPE and any rendering enhancements for 5 years, while the world progressed forward, MS inadvertently killed the spec. No matter how you slice it, it's still their fault.

IE6 had a dominating marketshare over an unprecedented period of time, making it a de-facto web standard, and MS completely stalled development on it. Given that web technologies constantly evolve, I call it negligence.

Can't they just patch IE6, and leave the unpatched to be damned?

What's so hard about browser standards?

[mangu]

use Firefox and convince everyone to do as well

That's the rational solution. If the developers at Microsoft had any brains, they would realize that and copy Firefox when doing IE8, the source code is open, under GPL and LGPL.

Re:What's so hard about browser standards?

[Sancho]

Right. The code for Internet Explorer is heavily shared around in other Microsoft software. If they included GPL code, they'd be legally required to open most of Windows under the GPL.

And don't say "Shh, what do you think I was trying to get them to do!?" They have expensive lawyers. They wouldn't make that kind of mistake.

Re:What's so hard about browser standards?

[LiENUS]

LGPL would not require them to open source very much of windows at all. It would essentially require them to open source what they take from mozilla.

Implementation Hell, Unnecessary For Firefox

[roca]

I've blogged about why I don't think we'll follow this path in Firefox.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/01/post_2.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/01/slipping_the_ba.html

One interesting thing is that as far as I can tell, this will become a crushing burden on IE development.

Re:Implementation Hell, Unnecessary For Firefox

[rhizome]

One interesting thing is that as far as I can tell, this will become a crushing burden on IE development.

From another perspective, this is exactly what's needed to foster dependence on Microsoft. The more complicated it is to develop for the dominant platform, the less time can be spent on compliant code.

WAAAAAIT!

[shoolz]

50% of the web would to break the moment IE8 is rolled out. Isn't it kind of nice to have the option as a webmaster to cause IE8 to render it the old way until you've had a chance to undo all your IE6 kludges and prep the site for IE8?

Re:WAAAAAIT!

[itlurksbeneath]

I'll call foul on that one. It isn't like people who do web development (even semi-casually) don't know that these browsers are coming down the pipe. They release beta versions well in advance of the actual release (IE 7 was in beta for what.. 6 months? and was out a year before MS set the drop dead date on IE6?).

You can't whine if you've had months of time to prepare.

Re:as long as they don't touch my tag

[Tumbleweed]

as long as they don't touch my <blink> tag, they can do whatever they want

<blink>i heart you</blink> blink tag, no one loves you like i do

I'm pretty sure necrophilia is illegal in most places...

Then opt-out.

[SanityInAnarchy]

First, if you're a webmaster who only designed for IE6, shame on you. If you designed for other browsers, which were mostly standards compliant, you should be able to just swap in one of those for IE8, with minimal tweaking. (Or maybe IE8 isn't that compliant, hmm?)

But more importantly, they are adding a non-standard tag to indicate standards-compliance, which is just fucked up. How about you use a non-standard tag to indicate non-standards-compliance -- to indicate that you want the old way of doing things? How about you just drop your DOCTYPE?

If you don't maintain your website enough to even be able to do that, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault. And it really pisses me off that Microsoft has the audacity to demand that the rest of the world code specifically for IE. You had to do that before, anyway, but this is the first time they've publicly admitted it. Can we have our antitrust suit back, please?

Re:Then opt-out.

[zoips]

Technically they are not adding a non-standard tag. They are reusing the meta tag. If you take their example and dump it into an XHTML 1.0 strict document it will still pass validation and will still be standards compliant. But yes, this whole thing is such a giant cockup it makes me almost want to go over to the IE building and slap these people.

Re:Then opt-out.

[Riquez]

First, if you're a webmaster who only designed for IE6, shame on you.

Technically you're not a webmaster or a web anything if you did this, you are an IE-master. Designing for IE only is not web design in my book.
"Web" & "master" infers a communal expertise, clearly which does not apply to the IE-master.

Actually, following on, IE-master doesn't work either. If you are a Master of IE only, then you would have some quite specific & detailed knowledge about how best to only cater to IE. In that case, you would be fairly intelligent & have realised that designing for IE only was folly. So what are we left with? ...

... Spammer.

Re:Then opt-out.

[ClosedSource]

Thanks. We'll all be waiting for your follow-on redefinitions with baited breath.

Re:Then opt-out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, the meta tag was a standard tag.

And below is the relevant paragraph from the article you did not read because you like shouting "holy war!" more than comprehension.

Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer, has often said that one of the core tenets of development on IE is that any choices the IE team makes must not "break the web". Sadly, IE7 did just that for quite a number of people. Unwilling to make the same mistake twice, Microsoft reached out to The Web Standards Project (of which I am a member) and to several other standards-aware developers, and asked for our help in coming up with a better method of allowing developers to "opt in" to proper standards support. The goal was to find a method that was more explicit than the DOCTYPE switch, and could be implemented in any browser, not just IE. You're welcome.

Re:Then opt-out.

[SanityInAnarchy]

The goal was to find a method that was more explicit than the DOCTYPE switch, and could be implemented in any browser, not just IE.

And they came up with browser detection 2.0.

I do apologize for not actually looking this up ahead of time. In my later posts in this thread, I do try to clarify that while the use of meta to do random things is not standard, this also means that any actual use of meta is, by definition, not part of the standard. Which is fine when it's actual, supplementary information. It's disgusting when it's suddenly actually required, and again, only for one browser.

God forbid the client is standards-compliant.

[jpellino]

They're again refusing to bite the bullet and make a browser that actually handles the ML it was meant to read, as well as pandering to leagues of sites who have used IE quirks to make end-runs, making piles of problems for competing browsers which ARE compliant. Having to hear some CS rep tell me they don't support Safari or Firefox as if I bought a crippled client... Priceless.

It's like someone welded a 777 wing to the roof of a Ford Escort thinking they were going to solve two problems. What's needed in Redmond is for someone with the vision and stones to drive the bloody thing off a cliff and go build a decent vehicle.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[dishpig]

This would all be true if - suddenly - everyone stopped using IE 6. But that's not going to happen. Instead I'll have to test in standards-compliant browsers, then add conditional tags for IE 6/7 and then add another additional tag for IE 8. What's the benefit to the web developer to add the IE 8 tag, instead of just letting it work as though it were an older version. Just seems like one more tag and one more browser to fire up to make sure it's working as advertised.

(slightly OT) A suggestion for Google...

[Saberwind]

Tweak your pagerank algorithm so it improves the position of pages that are xhtml-strict, (or at least well-formed and don't use nonstandard tags), and publicize the fact. That will provide an incentive for people to start making their pages standards-compliant. Currently there is very little incentive to standardize.

Re:(slightly OT) A suggestion for Google...

[FireFury03]

Tweak your pagerank algorithm so it improves the position of pages that are xhtml-strict

Sadly Google doesn't deal with XHTML well. I can only assume this is to prevent turning up XHTML sites when IE users search for stuff since IE won't display XHTML at all.

Is IE8 going to have XHTML support? (I'm not holding my breath). I'm certainly hoping Microsoft don't try to support the horribly broken mess that is HTML 5 first.

Re:(slightly OT) A suggestion for Google...

[The_reformant]

Yes because its perfectly sensible for google to degrade the quality of its search in order support web developers constant bitching that IE isnt standards compliant.
Google should be ranking pages on content not presentation

...not exactly

[misterdanimal]

Sending an HTTP header with the prefix of x- is perfectly legal as far as I know. I think it's the recommended way of sending data that may be safely ignored by other clients. Seems like much less of an ugly kludge than doctype switching or conditional comments.

Maybe it SHOULD be a standard. I'm tired of people hoping that someday we will reach a time where all browsers will have 100% compliance with all standards and we won't need to do some sort of negotiation to sort out the behavioral differences. This will never ever happen. And if it does, then the browser as a technology would be dead and unable to evolve or improve.

IE7 was a huge disappointment, so I'm hopeful that this could be better. It seems like it could be a less-than-terrible idea (I'm withholding judgement before I say it's a good idea). Other browsers could ignore these tags, or implement them if they wanted to. If they did, we could possibly have a way to select content within a document only when it's rendered by a particular document. (I don't have time to figure it out right now, but couldn't you do selector that finds children of a body element which is adjacent to a head element which contains the correct meta tag? Maybe not. Maybe with CSS3?

A simple suggestion

[bunratty]

Why don't they use the from HTML5 (for HTML documents) and XHTML served with the proper MIME type (for XHTML documents) to signal improved standards compliance mode? That would mean documents properly written to the newest HTML and XHTML standards would render with the strictest adherence to standards in IE8 and later browsers. It would also mean that the vast majority of documents (over 99.99%) that exist today would continue to be rendered as they currently are.

Re:A simple suggestion

[bunratty]

It looks like IE8 will use improved standards mode for HTML5 as described above, and will also do so for newer XHTML doctypes also. Now MS should drop the meta tag idea entirely. It's not needed after all anyway.

Which render mode...

[fahrbot-bot]

...won't suck? I'd like to use *that* one.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[misleb]

Actually, it is a lot easier to develop a site in strict/picky mode because a simple HTML/CSS validation will often tell you what is wrong. Where you might spend hours debugging something manually when using a "quirks" mode. Quirks mode is for lazy developers who think that they save time by not closing their P tags.

It is like developing Perl or C with full warnings turned on. It can be a pain to satisfy every pedantic complaint of the parser, but eventually you learn to do it right the first time and you might even find that the warnings indicate a much more serious error in the program logic.

-matthew

How long...

[dkarma]

until people just stop writing pages to work with internet explorer? I for one would love to see all pages written to be standards compliant ONLY. If IE users try to view my pages they get a nice blank page notifying them that they need to upgrade to mozilla if they want to view this page at all. Imagine a web in which the page coders force MS to play their game instead of the other way around. Am i just being idealistic to believe that web developers can and should take it upon themselves to influence the market in this way? As a web developer and an internet junkie if the browser I am using can't view pages I would switch to one that could in a heartbeat. Sure online stores, etc would see backlash from users who may go to a different spot to make their purchase, but in the long term wouldn't it be worth it?

Re:How long...

[tirk]

I'd love to impose such a system. I spend hours sometimes correcting pages to work correctly across the browsers, making a tweak for this or a tweak for that one. I'd love to just write code that is compliant and say if you can't see this, tough, get a browser that works right. But the realities of the marketplace won't allow this. You won't get people switching browsers, you'll get calls from angry customers, or lose business altogether. If everyone did it at once, it would cause MS to suffer, but it would also cause a lot of businesses to get a lot of angry calls. I provide e-mail services to people, only a POP3 server. If their internet goes down and they can't get their e-mail, they assume it's a problem with my server and call me. As much as I'd love to tell them to leave me alone and call the people that are causing the real problem, I can't do that. I have to help step them through the problem and then help point them to the proper person to call to fix it. Standards compliance as a developer is a lovely dream. As a customer, it doesn't mean anything, they just want it to work and if it doesn't, it's your fault. Doesn't matter what part breaks in the chain, it's your fault. Ford sells a new car and a part made by some third party breaks during the warranty period Ford doesn't say "sorry, not our part", they have to fix it.

Re:How long...

[cp.tar]

I definitely support the idea.

The way to do it, I think, is to start with the less commercially important pages. Something interesting, but not commercially relevant.
Serve them that page with a warning it doesn't work in IE.

They'll ignore your page.
They'll ignore mine as well.
The third page that tells them that... well, they might reconsider.

Re:How long...

[dkarma]

I figured that was the case, however I think it would be possible if the IE user was given not a blank page, but a link to directly download the mozilla browser. I think the average user would be willing to upgrade then and there to a new browser in order to: a)see that new video they are trying to watch on youtube or b) get that super deal they are trying to get or c)find the info they are looking for. For instance my buddy works for the geek squad and says he sees the same people coming in day after day with the same spyware. When asked about why they keep getting the spyware the users reply well I really wanted to watch that video / download that pr0n so i just clicked OK (and got a virus / trojan) I feel that most users would just do it and get it over with, but I do see your point.

Don't Microsoft have to live in the real world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or must it be us who change for their benefit?

The ones who wrote for IE6? Well, they had a similar problem upgrading from Office 97. This was paid for and MS weren't told off, neither were the developers.

human civilization

[Max_W]

More and more application work on the browser platform. Microsoft and Firefox (Netscape) are irresponsible entities, which came to the world market domination via some shady tricks.

Can the human civilization rely on these companies? The last ten years showed again and again that the answer is no.

It is wrong that both companies, which dominate the world market, are based in one country. Especially in a country with a doubtful record in the area of privacy.

The UN body, the International Telecommunication Union, should impose enforceable standards for a browser. The also should be an enforceable international law, which regulated the market share percentage. Say, no more than 15% for one browser, one OS, one country.

Noncompliance with these international laws, which caused the browser incompatibility, or spread of a computer virus, should be punished by the life in prison, without a parole.

Nice and all but

[Urger]

I'd rather have one render mode that actually works.

That's Fucked Up

[dcollins]

I prety much never comment on these Microsoft strategy threads... but man, that's fucked up. You need a special new MS tag to indicate standard, non-MS-specific behavior? MS is promoting this as standards compliant? Isn't that inherently contradictory?

[iamnotbroken] Yeah, thanks a bunch, Microsoft, you fucking a-holes. [/iamnotbroken]

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally an analogy that doesn't involve a fucking car! That being said, may I and my Sears catalog borrow your shed for 5 minutes?

"Invalid HTML" icon

[Ichijo]

Browser makers could do a lot of good for standards compliance if they would warn the user (unobnoxiously, of course) when he/she is visiting a web page containing invalid HTML code. You wouldn't purchase from a web site that doesn't cause the little lock icon to show up on your browser, so would you also think twice if you knew the company didn't care enough to produce standards-compliant HTML code?

Since the web browser is used as a development tool, it should alert the developer of any syntax errors instead of attempting to silently recover from them.

Re:"Invalid HTML" icon

[wizards_eye]

I think what you are looking for might be solved with this plugin for Firefox.
http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

Quote:
"HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page."

Sure, I'll give credit...

[SanityInAnarchy]

...when they actually do take steps towards improving standards compliance, as they did with IE7. Barely, but they did.

Here, they made it worse. They actually had the balls to add an IE-only tag (or header) in the name of standards compliance.

Still not questioning the performance of vaporware

[jbn-o]

The /. summary says:

This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test[...]

Using software that is still completely unavailable to anyone outside Microsoft. Thus this qualifies as vaporware and any claim about it is not to be taken seriously. Firefox, by comparison, delivers daily builds and you can use them to verify any claim made about its performance.

Yup a new tag

[lordandrei]

This tag basically translates to:

"Hi, I didn't follow standards until I got caught."

Personally, I think I find the tag is greatly helpful in finding which web devs I would and wouldn't want to hire.

"Ooh, look. A page that renders right and doesn't have the 'bad-dev seal of compliance'"

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[nick.ian.k]

No sir, for you see, my shed was built from meticulously detailed blueprints. But try the neighbors. I hear tell theirs is a real shit--OW!

geckoisgecko

[pizzach]

Make sure to give them the link to http://geckoisgecko.org/ . The web would be a better place if web developers thought more in terms of rendering engines rather than browser front-ends.

Re:An awful first step

[Spikeles]

IE should just bite the bullet. And have quirks mode OPT-IN, rather than the current default with Standards mode OPT-IN.

Is there this Display Mode?

[psychicsword]

Is there a display mode for one that works? :P

Aw fuck

[Vexorian]

Aw fucking god, hell Microsoft, |@~@|#~@# really. Really! Yeah mod me down whatever I don't care this is utter ridiculous, seriously.

I guess this means IE 8 doesn't really pass the Acid2 test, it passes a modified version of the Acid2 page, but hell I guess any browser can do that if modifying the test is allowed...

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[Myopic]

That's funny, I've never made a web page and checked it in IE. I always assumed that would be a giant waste of time. I prefer to know what my pages look like in *web browsers*, and since IE doesn't render web pages, it isn't a web browser. Tell your customers to download a web browser -- any one will do just fine. Your customers can hardly expect your pages to render in software that isn't a web browser. Do your pages render in vi? Of course not, vi isn't a web browser. Do they render in tcpdump? Of course not, tcpdump isn't a web browser. Do they render in Notepad? Of course not notepad isn't a web browser. Do they render in IE? No? They don't render in IE? Well then IE must not be a web browser.

Re:DAMN YOU, MIKKKR0$$$L0TH!!!!1!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds -1 "Unbelievable prat" to me.

TEH OMG!!!! I HAFTO AD TEH T@G!!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

TEH OMGWTFBBQ!?!?!?!

I hafto ad teh tagzor too mai w3b p@g3? WTF?!?!? DAT TWO HURD!!! IT AD TEH 14 MOAR BITES TOO MAI STREEMLYNED HTUML KODE!!!!

M$, PLS THUNK UF TEH BABIEZ!11!!1 kthxbai

Re:as long as they don't touch my tag

[HeroreV]

If you love the blink tag, just wait until you get a hold of text-decoration: blink.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#propdef-text-decoration

Three Modes for Three Kings

[WillAffleckUW]

One browser to Rule them all
One browser to BIND them
One browser to Rule them all
And in the darkness upgrade them

Three modes for the Geek Lords
Full of compatibility issues

Five modes for the Dwarven kings
Running at level Five

Seven modes for the Trekkers
Doomed to watch reruns

Nine modes for Mortal users
Doomed to die in the Aqua Screen of Death

One Browser to Rule Them All
One Browser to BIND them
One Browser in Redmond Lands
Losing market share

Re:An awful first step

[DragonWriter]

This seems like a good compromise that doesn't break any existing pages...

If by "break" you mean "render standards-compliant pages correctly where the current IE fails to", that would seem to be correct.

I'm not sure that's a reasonable definition of "break".

Re:An awful first step

[hr.wien]

I hear people use that excuse all the time, but I really don't buy it. Does Firefox, Opera or Safari break all these old IE6/7 pages? I know they don't render all of them pixel perfect, but it's been a real good long time since I've seen them break a page completely (making it unreadable).

IE8 in standards mode should render pages almost exactly like these browsers, so what's the problem with making that the default again?

Microsoft is afraid of a situation like when they introduced IE7, but that only happened because IE7 wasn't completely standards compliant and instead introduced a new set of quirks and bugs people had to develop hacks to get around. A completely standards compliant browser shouldn't have that much of a problem since people have been targeting all these other browsers for yonks already. The few pages that actually are affected could also easily be updated to force IE into IE7 mode through this new meta tag.

Compared to having to add this tag forever and ever until the end of time to stay out of IE7 mode, that's a tiny price to pay.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[Anonymous Coward]

But when Microsoft THEMSELVES try to do this with an automatic update to upgrade to version 7, they are "ramming it down our throats", "sneaking updates past us", and all the usual furore when Microsoft does ANYTHING.

They just cannot win, can they ???

What part of the standard says...

[dpbsmith]

...that you have to add a tag to the page to say that it is coded to the standard?

If the standard says that a page will render properly without that tag, then IE8 is not standards-compliant. It's as simple as that.

And a W3C truth squad should hold them to it, and complain whenever and whereaver Microsoft claims that IE8 complies with the standard.

Re:What part of the standard says...

[Shados]

Depending on the doctype, firefox will not be standard compliant either, and thats not part of the specs. Its just the best workaround they found. I don't agree with IE's new metatag way, but most browsers have tricks like that to preserve backward compatibility

showing the finger to MS IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm... browsers could recognize the tag, and display a banner above the page that screams, "THIS WEB PAGE IS NOT STANDARDS COMPLIANT, please ask your vendor to fix it".

Re:showing the finger to MS IE

[Kalriath]

So you're suggesting that the other browsers should lie about the standards compliance of a web page? Because last I checked, you could set a name value combo of "foo/fuckyou" to a META tag, and it would still comply with every standard there is. Your idea sucks balls.

IE Wants To Support Standards

[WebmasterNeal]

The reason they are doing this is so they can more aggressively support web standards. Currently they reason they are behind the curve on standards is because they are afraid to break websites written for previous versions. It's a vicious cycle.

With this change it will finally give them the chance to make massive overhauls (much like other browsers already have) to their rendering engine without having to worry about old sites.

Firefox, Opera, Safari don't need to worry about making old sites work because barely anybody uses them. Just think, if nobody used your browser, would you really care if a page from version 1 renders completely different than a page from version 2?

Although this is a great idea there is one flaw...the fact that if no meta tag is used, the browser will revert to IE7 mode. This is a horrible idea.

Re:IE Wants To Support Standards

[achenaar]

Firefox, Opera, Safari don't need to worry about making old sites work because barely anybody uses them.
That's a bit of a cheap shot. I'll bet you posted that from a non-IE browser and that just makes my head spin.
In any event, someone said Microsoft have a couple of options, but there is a third: hotfix IE for all versions so that the rendering engine actually *FRICKIN WORKS* the way it should according to the standards.
If (and I know it's a big IF given we're talking about the big M here) they've written it even nearly competently, modding the rendering engine should be fairly straightforward.
Bah.

Re:IE Wants To Support Standards

[Your.Master]

What you are proposing as a hotfix is just pushing IE8, without any back-compat at all. The only difference then is the UI.

Re:IE Wants To Support Standards

[bunratty]

Firefox, Opera, Safari don't need to worry about making old sites work because barely anybody uses them.

I suppose that's true if by "barely anybody" you mean less than 200 million users. Firefox alone has 125 million users. Why don't I see all those Firefox users complaining about the sites Firefox doesn't render properly with each new release of Firefox?

Re:IE Wants To Support Standards

[WebmasterNeal]

if firefox has 125 million users then IE has well over a billion. That doesn't add up.

Re:IE Wants To Support Standards

[bunratty]

There are about 1.3 billion Internet users according to Internet Growth Statistics. That seems to add up to me. Firefox may have up to 150 million users by now. So where are all the complaints about web sites breaking with each release of Firefox? All I can see is lame "memory leak" complaints that no one can seem to verify.

Modes?

[peektwice]

Which three... there are

• Ionian
• Dorian
• Phrygian
• Lydian
• Mixolydian
• Aeolian
• Locrian

What's that... render modes? OOOOHHH....

Re:Modes?

[josepha48]

buggy, buggier, and buggiest !

lol.... actually the idea of using a meta tag for separating modes is so MS like, right up there with conditional comments <!--[ if IE gt 6 ]>crashAndBurn();<[endif]-->

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[dishpig]

Professionally, as a web developer, I'm ok with this. Getting rid of IE 6 (and good god, my web stats even show 5.5 - c'mon grandma!) in any way possible is a good thing.

And personally I'm ok with it because I'm not a customer.

This is what passes for insight now?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft is not a software company, it is an abuse company"?
"The only reason for slavery was so rich people could feel superior"?
"Billionaires need people to abuse"?

Those are supposed to be accurate and useful observations?

oh hell!

[JucaBlues]

oh hell! the meta tag switch to turn on standards compliance is non-compliant!

Proposed tag actually looks pretty well designed

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the "A List Apart" article linked from the summary - the proposed X-UA-Compatible feature actually looks pretty well designed, and very similar to the idea of using a version tag in a wire protocol to allow newer clients to communicate sanely with older servers that don't necessarily understand all of the features in the latest and greatest version of the protocol. About the only reservation I have with it is the question of standardising the User Agent abbreviations for the different browsers - using abbreviations makes sense in terms of making it easy to add these headers by hand, but also increases possible problems with namespace clashes.

For those that don't want to read the whole article, the only thing the proposed meta tag really states is which specific user agents the site developer has tested with their site. X-UA-Compatible aware browsers (such as IE8) can look at the tag to decide whether to render the page using their "latest and greatest" rendering engine, or to use a specific older variant.

Hopefully the Microsoft IE 8 crew will take a look at the IETab extension for Firefox and give users/IT administrators some ability to control client-side which rendering engine gets used for different sites. With IETab, Firefox uses its own rendering engine by default and IE's rendering engine if the site matches a user-defined list of URL patterns. In addition, the rendering engine for a page you are currently viewing can be switched with a click of a button (so if a page seems to be broken, checking if it works properly in IE is a trivial exercise).

Imagine how convenient it would be if IE8 came with a status bar widget to switch rendering engines and a few advanced configurations options like:

Default rendering engine:
    Whether to use the IE6, IE7 or IE8 engines for sites without an X-UA-Compatible header
Ignore X-UA-Compatible headers:
    Enable this option to always use the default rendering engine, even if X-UA-Compatible is set
Show rendering engine in status bar:
    Enable the rendering engine switching widget (similar to the Firefox/IE icon shown by IETab)
Force rendering engine:
    A list of URL patterns (again like IETab's) associated with specific rendering engines.

Hell, imagine an option in IETab to look for X-UA-Compatible tags and switch back to the Firefox rendering engines automatically if a site flagged as being IE-only on the client returns an X-UA-Compatible tag saying it now works properly in Firefox.

fuck it all

[Narcocide]

I'm switching to plain text.

Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness.

[Futurepower(R)]

Please name one thing that Microsoft has ever done that was completely free of abusive elements.

Remember Microsoft Basic? It came with a very poor manual that didn't document serious quirks of the language.

Remember Microsoft Assembler? It sometimes didn't create accurate code.

It's been like that since the beginning, and it is like that now. Windows Vista is sloppy, unfinished code that causes users a lot of grief.

MS got the box model right.

[weston]

Yes. Let them add hacks like . Don't make the standards compliant people have to add .

The box model is actually one of the few cases where Microsoft did it right in the first place, and the w3c did it wrong. Conceiving padding as something that's not internal to a given block is highly non-intuitive and annoying, it actually makes certain things impossible. Want precisely proportional columns, but fixed-width padding? You could do it with a sane box model with no additional markup, but with the w3model, you'll need another div.

I say this as someone who has a burning hatred for the IE product management team -- I'm normally a bleeding-heart compassionate type, but for the thousands of hours of my life they've stolen from not only me but every web developer in the world who has to work around the intentional weaknesses in their product, I'd happily smile as they were methodically flayed in a lemon juice bath between bouts of being shat upon by elephants. But they might deserve an ever so small moment of reprieve from their prolonged suffering for intelligently bucking the weak w3 choice.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[spyowl]

The box model is actually one of the few cases where Microsoft did it right in the first place, and the w3c did it wrong.

That's debatable. Besides, (I don't actually know if they did in this case or not but) there is/was nothing preventing Microsoft from making the case for their ideas and eventually getting them in the official W3C recommendations.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[vux984]

If someone one hands you a standard to implement, you don't say, "hey that's stupid, I'm just going to do it this other way instead."

That is just beyond stupid.

Hell, I'd even be ok if MS had said, "w3c width is stupid, I'll just add a new tag, exwidth which does it the way we think makes sense." Because at least then they could still support the standard width tag to the standard, and render pages written to the standard correctly. If someone found exwidth easier to use, and used it instead those pages would also render fine in IE, and then break elsewhere in other browsers... although I could easily see support for 'exwidth' become a de-facto part of the standard and implemented in netscape/mozilla/firefox/whatever if enough people wanted it and enough pages used it... and that would be fine too. (In that at least we wouldn't have the mess we're in now.)

Bottom line, when your writing to a standard, write to the standard. If you don't like the standard, fine create your own (even if "your own" is just the original with some extensions), but don't write a broken implementation on purpose. It NEVER works out well for anybody. Users, developers, everybody suffers.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[MightyYar]

But so why keep all the names of the standard yet behave in a non-standard way? All they had to do was call it internal-padding or ie-padding instead of padding and we'd all have been spared the pain. I'm not the biggest fan of the way CSS was spec'd, either, but if you must diverge from a standard at least make it clear that you are diverging!

Re:MS got the box model right.

[atamido]

"w3c width is stupid, I'll just add a new tag, exwidth which does it the way we think makes sense."

Actually, that's pretty brilliant. The correct box model is actually pretty difficult to work with using the options we have, and just adding an extra CSS attribute to do things the way that everyone wants to would solve all of those problems. IE5 implementing it would have been a good thing for the world.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[weston]

That's debatable.

I've mentioned two cons. I'm not aware of any pros, but I'd be happen to listen to arguments in favor of the w3c way of doing it and why they're compelling enough to justify the problems created.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[atamido]

Ah, nevermind. It looks like it's in the CSS3 spec right now.
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-ui/#box-sizing

Re:MS got the box model right.

[weston]

If someone one hands you a standard to implement, you don't say, "hey that's stupid, I'm just going to do it this other way instead."

It depends on *how* stupid it is and what alternatives exist. This particular decision seems pretty stupid, and at the time it was issued, nobody was any more standards compliant than Microsoft was (in fact, MS led the pack for a while). And so MS probably had a good chance of establishing a better concept as the standard, and we might have even been better of if they'd pulled it off and the other browser makers followed suit.

And this brings us to a point I don't think a lot of MS critics understand. The most heinous thing about IE isn't that they sometimes implement their own standard, it's that a good deal of their implementation -- whether it be w3c or home-grown -- is half-assed enough that it's unecessarily difficult (if not impossible) to get the job done with the tools they give you. I don't care if that they have their own weird filter crap for doing opacity -- as long as it works. The bug that makes it so links don't work in containers with the alphaImage filter applied, though, that's blood-boiling. I'd *prefer* there to be standards agreement, but just having an equivalent reliable toolbox would be good enough, and the fact that MS can't follow through there is what bothers me so much about them. They essentially force devs to work on a platform that is not merely different, it's out-and-out broken, and that's the place where the real costs in terms of time and money pile up.

I could easily see support for 'exwidth' become a de-facto part of the standard and implemented in netscape/mozilla/firefox/whatever if enough people wanted it and enough pages used it.

Your suggestion is a good one, and was basically proposed for CSS 3, under the property names box-width and box-height. It even in a working draft, I think... and then it fell out again somehow. So, somebody on the working group apparently doesn't like it for some reason -- what, I can't imagine, I've certainly never heard any good justification for it.

and that would be fine too. (In that at least we wouldn't have the mess we're in now.)

As I said elsewhere, I really don't see the mess here so much. It would be *nice* if there were one box model, but since the proposed standard one is messed up, you already have to do manual calculation to know break the real box width into padding + content dimensions, adding a *height or *width property with the sum (or using a doctype that doesn't trigger quirks mode) really isn't more work.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[weston]

I agree with you that would have been the better thing to do, especially with foresight towards today's multi-browser universe. The thing is, that's not the environment they made their decision in. At the time, they had a chance to define the standard, and there are worse places to diverge than where the standard itself doesn't make a lot of sense.

What I think is particularly interesting is that your suggestion did find its way into the CSS3 working draft at some point via the "box-width" and "box-height" properties.... which seem to have been dropped in recent draft. Seems odd to me, given the quality of the idea. I have half an inkling that the problem is that someone on the working group is simply allergic to the idea (MS probably suggested it in the 90s, and it's definitely been suggested now, and it has obvious merit) for reasons that aren't clear.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[Carewolf]

No. The standard was unclear on the subject. When a standard is unclear you implement the most sane interpretation of it, and Microsoft did that, and Netscape/Mozilla implemented a brain-dead interpretation of it, and manipulated the W3C to make their mistakes the law.

Re:MS got the box model right.

[vux984]

No. The standard was unclear on the subject. When a standard is unclear you

Go to the standards body and get clarification? Ask the others what they're doing and reach a consensus? Implemenent it the best you can while remaining open to change when clarification arrives?

implement the most sane interpretation of it,

Yeah, ok. But you don't dig in and refuse to change when the standard goes a different direction.

Besides the 'netscape' interpretation wasn't insane. Hell, one could even rationally argue that the box should be defined by the border, with margin on the outside and padding on the inside, and then we can argue whether the actual border should be inside or outside...

An insane interpretation would be one in which the margin and padding are counted but the border width isn't.

and Microsoft did that, and Netscape/Mozilla implemented a brain-dead interpretation of it,
  and manipulated the W3C to make their mistakes the law.

1) Even if that is exactly what happened, you still bring your product into compliance with the standard when the standard gets clarified.

2) I think you are overstating the degree of 'manipulation' here.

Totally agree - why should *I* help Microsoft?

[SuperKendall]

By adding a tag to render a page more properly, I am explicitly helping Microsoft continue IE's market dominance. If more and more pages render poorly on IE, then people will continue to seek other browsers - something we would all benefit from by making standards really count. It's insane that I should feel at all inclined to alter code to help them, increasing my testing load in the process and stifling true standards adherence by allowing the majority of the market to continue comfortably using IE.

s/ago/from now

[BeanThere]

Sorry, not "ten years ago", I meant "ten years from now".

Definitely a win for everyone.

[weston]

Every user I educate is a win for me.
And for everybody else, in the end.

Normally I see this sort of thing as tilting at windmills, frustrating for me and often ineffective.

However:

(a) working with MS's rather deliberate IE incompatibilities has frustrating enough I don't care
(b) Firefox offers readily graspable advantages in terms of ease of use, featureset, and security
(c) There's a straightforward case to be made that continuing to use IE costs everyone money -- web development for everyone (including YOUR organization) could be cheaper or faster if developers didn't have to worry about IE's flaws, and Microsoft really has no incentive to fix them other than as a kind of "take me back, I've changed" token that's pretty much parallel to the kinds of gifts and promises that flow from an abusive spouse when their partner decides to leave.

It's straightforward. Firefox is the better product. Using IE costs everyone money. I think it's a winning message. I'll be continuing to provide IE inclusive development when I need to, but I'm not going to be shy about explaining the costs to clients.

Re:Definitely a win for everyone.

[cp.tar]

Normally I see this sort of thing as tilting at windmills, frustrating for me and often ineffective.

It is tilting at windmills, but I don't care. One step at a time, I can walk around the world. One user at a time, I can convert the web.</messiahcomplex>

As usual no one actually RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone notice that discussed related issues with the folks at http://webstandards.org/ before making this decision? While they do not claim to support the decision 100%, they do understand the factors that went into the decision and they seem to feel that MS generally listened to their feedback.

As far as I can see, this is just about the only option that allows them to do two very important things: "Render standard HTML in a more standard way" and "Don't break existing pages".

If you can think of a better way to do both, I would love to hear it. (And using 'doctype' is not an a better answer as it has just as many problems as this compromise does.)

Coming from the corporate world, "Don't break existing pages" is the more important of the two. I know of at least 30 products that shipped html help files way back when IE and Netscape were the only browsers anyone was using. These helpfiles shipped with the product and cannot be updated easily as they are installed locally on tens of thousands of machines around the world. If MS actually wants folks to upgrade to IE8 it _cannot_ break these pages.

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[Anonymous Coward]

But apparently you keep buying their products.

Microsoft users are funny. Bitch and moan about Microsoft on the one hand, yet bitch and moan any time somebody suggests switching to anything else.

What incentive does Microsoft have to stop "abusing" you? They continually release crap software, and their customers continually throw money at them, expecting that *this* time it'll be different, this time they'll get what was promised. How many times do they have to fool you before you realize what's going on? It's really hard to pity somebody who keeps asking for more.

You've chosen Microsoft, now live with the consequences and stop whining.

Remember NT as a "Posix compliant" OS?

[weston]

Yeah.

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[Oliver Defacszio]

If you're going to spout eye-rolling baloney like that, then I think you should take it all the way:

So please, name one software product of any consequence (meaning, fifty liners don't count), that has a UI, that has ever, throughout all the history of meaningful software, been absolutely free of gotchas. I've been hammering away at these damned electronic boxes for 19 years, both privately and professionally, and I have yet to ever see even one that didn't offer up *something* stupid. For the size and complexity of the applications that Microsoft produces, they have no more idiocy than anything else.

But, since you're obviously so plugged into the mind of Microsoft (much like the other million Slashdotters), I'll wait here while you put your money where your mouth is.

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[palegray.net]

This stuff isn't abuse, although it may qualify as "producing a crappy product." How many times have you made a spelling error on a business document? Were you abusing your intended audience?

Heavily used open source software, including GCC, doesn't always work as it should. Are the authors just downright nasty, abusive people? I don't think so, man. You need some sedatives. Sorry about my abusive nature.

This is a bit of a catch-22...

[Rearden82]

So let me get this straight:

We will be forced to continue making standards-compliant sites with IE-specific hacks until IE6 and IE7 are finally eradicated (at this rate, I'm hoping for some time around 2025).

Then, on that glorious day, we will finally be able to make standardized sites without any IE-specific hacks. Except, of course, for the META tag that tells IE8+ not to mimic older versions of IE that are no longer in use. Wow.

Hey, while we're at it, why not have Firefox 3 act like Netscape 1.1 unless you add some arbitrary tag to every single website you work with? It would make just as much goddamned sense!

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[NickCatal]

It's been like that since the beginning, and it is like that now. Windows Vista is sloppy, unfinished code that causes users a lot of grief.

I have never had a problem with Vista, nor has anyone I deal with had any problems. I recommend turning off the 'protection system' they have when you are first setting up your machine, but after that I enable it again.

IE8 *Will Not* be standards compliant

[weston]

to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?

The meta tag is pretty flexible, you can improvise with them quite a bit and still stay in the realm of standards, and I suspect that's what they'll do.

However, that said, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction:

IE8 *Will Not* be standards compliant.

I'll be somewhat surprised if it turns out to genuinely pass the ACID2 test. I think it's highly likely that they don't mean the same thing you and I would mean when they make this claim. I think it's even somewhat likely that even if the browser *does* pass it, it does so because they've coded it specifically to do so, not to actually meet the broad case of standards applications. Both kinds of behavior are in character with classic Microsoft behavior, and it's not at all clear why anyone would expect them to change.

But most of all, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were at least honestly *trying* to advance towards compliance with IE7, the progress made was pretty pitiful. They even *introduced* new bugs, for example, new cases of disappearances for absolutely positioned elements inside of relatively positioned ones.

The other browser makers have intentionally spent years recruiting, hiring, and fostering the progress of developers who cared about getting it right. Microsoft has made its entire career off of barely credible half-assed software implementations for the specific purpose of vendor lock-in. It's almost certain that as an organization, they don't even know how to do it right.

IE Box model was more sensible

[weston]

Everything from their faulty implementation of the box model

Their box model was actually more sensible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug#Support_for_Internet_Explorer.27s_box_model

There's a lot more heinous sins on their bug resumé than failing to follow in an area where the w3c pretty much messed up.

Seeing as how it is the de-facto standard, it's good that they're putting at least some effort into making it better.

I don't buy it yet. IE7 was a lukewarm set of improvements that essentially introduced Yet Another Browser that wasn't trustworthy, so there's little evidence MS actually cares about anything other than *seeming* like they're doing product development at this point.

Re:IE Box model was more sensible

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot more heinous sins

Hardly. It doesn't get much worse than knowingly implementing something as central as the box model in violation of the standard, no matter how you think of that part of the standard.

Re:IE Box model was more sensible

[weston]

Easily. The box model thing actually *made more sense*, plus it was documented from the start, the workarounds became known fairly quickly, and they really don't require much more mental effort than the extra arithmetic that's necessitated by the broken w3c concept in the first place.

By contrast, say, the blocks that just straight-out entirely vanish from the page when you do something rather mundane like absolutely positioning or float them are much worse. These bugs are now somewhat understood and there's workarounds, but the workarounds took years of hit-and-miss testing and experimentation to suss out, and they still fail for some common cases... and they've changed somewhat (but not gone away!) in IE7.

Much worse.

There was another option

[weston]

... and it was to cede the browser field entirely, and leave the web client development up to the organizations who've put years into getting it right.

This option actually really makes sense if having a working web client for your customers is actually what you care about. It would be trivial for them to use Gecko as a rendering engine for IE, it would save them a significant chunk of resources, and they could happily go about making serious progress in the realm of web "middleware" as they have with the .NET platform.

But nope. They still have to write their own, even though there's no evidence they actually even know how. And the only explanations that really makes sense are either sheer ego, or that it doesn't fit with a genuine strategy... which is basically another way of saying they still fully intend to screw with the standards.

2) You can pass it as a HTML header, so if you want just add it to your apache config, and all pages on your website will be rendered in IE8 cleanly (this is the option I intend to take).

I can see the appeal, but having documents behave/render differently based on server environment is really gonna screw with some people's heads. The HTTP header idea seems worse to me than the meta tag idea.

Re:There was another option

[Chris_Jefferson]

... and it was to cede the browser field entirely, and leave the web client development up to the organizations who've put years into getting it right.

No, that's completely not an option. Do you really think that the programmers at Microsoft aren't capable of writing a standards-compliant browser? I know a bunch of people who work there, and I am in no doubt that if they decided that what they should do is get a 100% standards accurate browser, they could do it faster and better than anyone else.

However, they know that doing so wouldn't actually improve their market share. It would in fact piss off all the people who have web apps which still rely on IE6 rendering bugs. Those people aren't going to accept "But your old apps were non-standard", their apps worked before and they want them to continue working.

Changing to Gecko would break all those applications and websites. Believe me, there are still large intrawebs were Gecko simply can't go, due to it's lack of support of IE 6 bugs.

Re:There was another option

[weston]

No, that's completely not an option. Do you really think that the programmers at Microsoft aren't capable of writing a standards-compliant browser? I know a bunch of people who work there, and I am in no doubt that if they decided that what they should do is get a 100% standards accurate browser, they could do it faster and better than anyone else.

I'm sure some of the individuals there are capable of being part of a team that produces a standards compatible browser. However, there's simply no evidence that Microsoft as an organization is capable of delivering such a thing -- even the efforts they've put out when they led the pack (IE5 for the Mac was really advanced in support for the time, IE5 win was certainly beyond most windows options) have fallen far short, and IE7's progress has been absolutely underwhelming. My guess is that it's not that they don't have talent that could do it, but that the management and organizational will is just missing. Maybe that's a lot like saying "if they wanted to," but I think it's more like "if they wanted to, Lions could eat carrots." Probably true. Unlikely to happen.

It would in fact piss off all the people who have web apps which still rely on IE6 rendering bugs. Those people aren't going to accept "But your old apps were non-standard", their apps worked before and they want them to continue working.

Every version of IE has broken some sites coded for the previous version, but that's beside the point. It would only be slightly less trivial to use the gecko engine for rendering in IE8 and leave the old engine for 6, if slightly more bloated, certainly less work than wrangling the 6/7 codebase into real compliance.

However, they know that doing so wouldn't actually improve their market share.

Market share has nothing to do with this. IE can be branded as Microsoft IE no matter what rendering engine it uses (see: Geo/Chevy Prizm). So it's not a rationale. The only reason you need your own rendering platform these days is if you *plan* to do something that differs from standards efforts.

This has to happen

[Eskarel]

Microsoft can't break old sites. They can't, it would break the internet. Most sites that do compatibility checks don't check for IE 6 they check for IE, that's why most of these problems occur. A page can run fine in firefox, fine in IE 6, but crap itself in IE7 for these very reasons.

What Microsoft needs to do is ensure that standards compliant code runs properly in their browser, then anything new can be developed compliant with the standards(this is in the best interest of web developers because it's easier than doing it 3 different ways), and all the old stuff still works. Eventually the old stuff will either get redeveloped or become so out of date that it doesn't matter at which point Microsoft can stop supporting its old legacy crap. But if the next version of IE all of a sudden supported compliant code and only compliant code then half the web(including a lot of the stuff that's actually written in a compliant way) would stop working in IE. No one except the linux zealots wants that.

Sad, but true

[stewby18]

I wish this were funny, but it's not. Many, many sites (including lots of big name sites--Yahoo anyone?) look for "Firefox" and the Firefox version they want, rather than the Gecko version that has been available in the UA since before Firefox was called Firefox, and if your browser isn't called Firefox (and isn't Netscape, IE, or Safari), tough luck.

It really sucks for anyone trying to use (or build) a Gecko-based browser that's not Firefox.

IE7 not compatible with IE6 or VS 2005

[Nom du Keyboard]

IE7 is already a problem. ASP pages generated in Visual Studio 2005 (the latest version) that work perfectly well in IE6, break in IE7. If Microsoft wanted to provide a proper solution, IE8 would, by default, render VS 2005 generated ASP pages at least as well as IE6 does. When Microsoft already isn't compatible with itself, it shouldn't be going off in additional new directions!

FF, Opera and Safari have 3 modes too

[Artefacto]

Firefox, Safari and Opera have an "Almost Standards Compliant Mode" in addition to the Quirks Mode and Standards Compliant Mode. It shouldn't shock anyone that Microsoft is adding a third... See http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

mis-labelled

[dynamo]

if you need to add a meta tag, it is NOT standards compliant.

F-ing Tags

[simpl3x]

No. You add a meta tag that says, "Fuck you Microsoft!"

Then, you add some script that directs the user to a pretty error page. Perhaps the WaSP could develop a meta tag and page that renders well for our standards challenged friends...

We all know that we'll all add it, sadly enough. But we could have fun along the way. Maybe a god song would help...

suggestion

[itmo]

How about implement the 3 engines but make the "heuristic" of selecting between them a bit more intelligent..

1.if it is bullshit and/or marked as such, render as bullshit
2.if it is marked as standard, assume it is standard, if something is broken , render as bullshit
3.give the user and option (by default on) to render all compliance-claiming sites where (last modified) (releasedate of ie8) as
    ie-bullshit and all newer sites as standards compliant.

Re:suggestion

[itmo]

stupid of me .. it should have been (lastmodified) is less than (ie8 releasedate)

ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be a necrophiliac, but then some rotten asshole split on me.

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[__aaqvdr516]

Well put! I've seen some screwy things on all three OS's and the major browsers as well. I just don't have 19 years of experience to put behind it. Your post needs some mod love.

LGPL vs. Tivoization on Xbox 360

[tepples]

LGPL would not require them to open source very much of windows at all. The Gecko engine is LGPLv2.1. LGPLv2.1 states that the "complete source code [which must be distributed with all copies] means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the library" (my emphasis). LGPLv3 and GPLv3 are even more explicit, requiring those who distribute software for the home market to provide "installation information" so that users can install homemade versions of the Gecko engine. This would circumvent Microsoft's intent on platforms such as Xbox 360 that are designed to run only digitally signed code.

Hubris

[mgbastard]

Part of the standard is to provide a doctype. Let's not fuck it all up by adding some non-standard meta tag to indicate that you have actually followed standards. I realize this is par for Microsoft, because they cannot be seen to have made an error in their engineering by the general public. (By failing to properly switch OFF quirks mode on doctype'd documents) Well f u. The very idea that they will apply quirks mode to a css box model document with a properly declared doctype (like XHTML) is bonkers. I don't suppose anyone provided more detailed logic in their switch? The TFA seemed to indicate the meta tag is mandatory, no matter the doctype.

HTTP headers are not saved

[tepples]

I've complained in the past about the fact that Microsoft seemingly ignores the fact that http-equiv is only a poor workaround for web developers that can't transmit headers properly, and real HTTP headers are the proper way of doing it. When the user tells a web browser to save an HTML document to disk, it saves the HTML, not the HTTP headers. So why is it a good idea to have HTTP headers, which are not saved with a document, define the semantics of a document? Or are all file systems that do not use a separate "fork" or "alternate data stream" for HTTP headers considered harmful?

Re:HTTP headers are not saved

[Bogtha]

So why is it a good idea to have HTTP headers, which are not saved with a document, define the semantics of a document?

It's not semantics, it's metadata, and there are all kinds of reasons why it should be available outside the document itself, both from necessity (e.g. Content-Type) and practicality (the example I used earlier of setting super-standards mode across entire server farms with a single line in a config file).

Or are all file systems that do not use a separate "fork" or "alternate data stream" for HTTP headers considered harmful?

It has always been necessary for browsers to take HTTP headers into account when saving a document. Consider the media type, or character encoding, or content encoding. Ignoring these headers when saving breaks documents. You don't need special filesystem tricks to deal with it either, I don't know why you think that's the case.

Re:HTTP headers are not saved

[tepples]

It has always been necessary for browsers to take HTTP headers into account when saving a document. Consider the media type, or character encoding, or content encoding. Media type (e.g. image/png vs. image/gif) is encoded in the filename, as is content encoding (plain vs. gzip). What portable file system feature can store character encodings or rendering profiles?

Re:HTTP headers are not saved

[Bogtha]

Media type (e.g. image/png vs. image/gif) is encoded in the filename, as is content encoding (plain vs. gzip).

No, content encoding is typically handled by saving the decoded version. There's no filename tricks.

In any case, that's hardly a counterpoint. All you are doing is proving my point — that when a web browser saves a document, it has to take HTTP headers into account rather than simply ignoring them.

What portable file system feature can store character encodings or rendering profiles?

Why are you so obsessed with solving this with filesystem tricks?

By grouping character encodings together with rendering profiles, it seems you are acknowledging that this situation exists regardless of this rendering profile header. Is this so?

Re:HTTP headers are not saved

[tepples]

By grouping character encodings together with rendering profiles, it seems you are acknowledging that this situation exists regardless of this rendering profile header. Is this so? No, I had to finish my comment in order to catch a bus. Since then, I realized that character encoding could be handled much like transfer encoding: through a transformation to UTF-8. But what would rendering profiles be transformed to, if we are trying to avoid the use of http-equiv?

Re:HTTP headers are not saved

[Bogtha]

Since then, I realized that character encoding could be handled much like transfer encoding: through a transformation to UTF-8.

And that's how I'd do it too. But if I recall correctly, browsers tend to just insert a <meta> element instead or ignore the issue entirely.

But what would rendering profiles be transformed to, if we are trying to avoid the use of http-equiv?

I'm not against using http-equiv for the purpose of providing HTTP information in a non-HTTP situation like loading from disk, it's just a poor substitute when HTTP headers are available. If a web browser has no other way of preserving the HTTP metadata, then it should use http-equiv. But that's the web browser's job, not the web developer's. And as I pointed out, this is already an issue for a number of HTTP headers, so it's no real argument against using it in this case too. The complexity cost has already been incurred by the very nature of the HTTP protocol.

Lesser of two evils

[cafelatte]

What Microsoft is doing here is allowing a way for web developers to transfer smoothly to standards compliance without breaking a lot of web sites instantly with a browser upgrade. Let's say a web developer did what we all want them to do and create a site that is standards compliant. In IE6, 7 or 8 that site may break. This is not an option for most web sites. Instead they'll resort to non-standard code or (even better) use simple code. It'll be that way until IE8 gains a lot of marketshare. All of a sudden, one day web developers can instantly create a standards compliant site and add that tag in and it'll still work on most browsers just fine. Maybe one day Microsoft will have standards mode set by default (I'm talking about 15 years from now or something) and sites won't even have to put in that tag. I'm happy with what Microsoft did here. It's the lesser of two evils but still not ideal. I would have preferred that they put standards by default.

Re:Lesser of two evils

[JackHoffman]

The opposite will happen. Since you can't write standards compliant pages which work in IE6 and/or IE7, web authors will continue to write broken pages for those browsers. They simply have to, as long as those browsers have any market share. Those pages will not be updated, because thanks to the new header, IE8 doesn't screw up these pages and updating isn't necessary. All other browsers now have to deal with those broken pages too, and since the pages come with the information which rendering engine they expect, users will push the other vendors to implement a compatible rendering mode. Now Microsoft can safely ignore the standards and implement only what is necessary to keep their major customers happy, because their browser never has to assume that a page actually wants to be rendered according to a standard.

Without the existence of the header, IE couldn't tell an actually standards-compliant page from an IE6- or IE7-only page with a doctype. Then it would have to render existing doctypes nonconformingly (like IE6/7, to maintain compatibility) and new doctypes conformingly (like other standards compliant browsers.) Then MS could not choose which parts of the standard they implement, which parts they change and which parts they extend, because the doctype refers to a standard, not a browser version.

As innocent as this extension may seem, it is a major setback for web standards.

I don't care about your job

[mandelbr0t]

I don't want it. Yes, you feed your family. Good for you. You do it by supporting a system that you know to be flawed, and worse, you give us your "wisdom" about how you do it because "80% of the target audience uses this crap". Never mind that the 80% was gained by thoroughly illegal and unethical means. I've got news for you -- cowering in the corner chanting the Microsoft mantra isn't wisdom. I'll admit it -- I stood up for what I believed in and got shot down by the Juggernaut. That's what you fear most in life, that you can't provide for your family anymore because you dared to express an opinion that was contrary to the Mighty Microsoft's evil plan. Nothing in this world is permanent; in the words of Governor Arnie, "I'll be back". And when I and other similar minded people get into a position to remove you from your job and replace it with someone who's competent, I won't shed a single tear for you or your starving kids. You willingly spread the bullshit and lies, so when your turn comes to suffer, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Why another?

[localman]

I believe MIcrosoft and everyone would be better off if they just made Gecko the new IE8 rendering engine. They can keep IE7 rendering in there too, and heck I'll even take the annoying idea that I have to add a tag to get rendered correctly... but for the love of god we don't need _another_ guaranteed-to-be-slightly-quirky browser rendering engine to test and support.

They can save themselves the development time. They can avoid the ire of web developers everywhere. They can still let app developers use the IE7 kit for embedding if they want. Everyone wins. I don't see what Microsoft (or anyone) gains by writing another engine.

Cheers.

Re:as long as they don't touch my tag

[Hadlock]

http://www.hwilson.com/

The blink tag doesn't render, or at least is turned off in FF, but I know in IE it still works... I have to visit this site at least once a week and even when I shut my eyes, it's just... blink...... blink.... blink

How about...

[BlightShadow]

How about putting this tag in your code:

<!--[if IE]><a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Go Get a Standards Compliment Browser</a><![endif]-->

Re:How about...

[vertigoCiel]

People probably won't care enough about your site to get Firefox, if they're the typical IE user. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to see your site, no matter what browser. Your "IE Compatible Mode Tag" would be unacceptable for any website that has to target a large amount of IE users (e.g. any commercial website). It might be fine for your personal website, where it doesn't matter too much if you lose some IE users, but when sales depend on traffic, you can't afford to turn anyone away.

Yes, Firefox is a much better browser than IE. We know that. Unfortunately, IE will not be eradicated for the near future, and for non-technically-inclined Windows users, it will remain the browser of choice. It seems like it will be much easier to develop websites that work in IE 8 (unless it too is "quirky"), and Microsoft is doing this without breaking old sites, at the cost of one meta tag, however inane and redundant that tag may be. It's a much better solution than "Oh, everyone would hate to see all their hard work hacking their sites for IE 6 and 7 to go to waste, let's keep IE 8 quirky." I don't see another solution that transitions to standards-compliance whilst not breaking old sites. Do you?

Re:How about...

[cp.tar]

People probably won't care enough about your site to get Firefox, if they're the typical IE user. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to see your site, no matter what browser. Your "IE Compatible Mode Tag" would be unacceptable for any website that has to target a large amount of IE users (e.g. any commercial website). It might be fine for your personal website, where it doesn't matter too much if you lose some IE users, but when sales depend on traffic, you can't afford to turn anyone away.

I believe that's why I suggested doing so on interesting, but commercially non-critical sites first.

At this point, businesses cannot afford to lose money, even though they can blame no-one but themselves for the ever-growing expenses of web-development.

Fuck em

[The Solitaire]

I wouldn't do this for client's websites, but for my own personal ones, they can go to hell. I'll code to the W3C standards. I'm not going to break my code for their benefit. I'll be nice though. There'll be a big, shiny 'Get Firefox' button somewhere.

As Ron Weasley might say:

[ClosedSource]

You really need to sort out your priorities.

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[ThePromenader]

But you can't compare all OS's and applications as if they all have the same work ethics, ideas and development resources.

MS is a company that has had a) few original ideas but b) HUGE resources - the difference between the two, in addition to their decades of constant, stubborn fuck-ups, smacks of mismanagement and sheer technological incompetence, making them one of the "worst" (inexcusable) software companies out there; or perhaps they simply don't care, as, in spite of all their product's faults, people keep buying them.

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why developers keep bashing their head against the wall. If enough places started redirecting people to a page suggesting switching to firefox, and not allow IE users on the site, people would start to switch, the same way alot of "IE only" pages have redirected netscape, mozilla, firefox, and any other browsers.

If IE users can't access webpages, they'll be forced to switch to a decent browser.

Now, you're about to say "oh but we'll lose users" - So fucking what? They'll switch eventually when enough sites start doing it. Yes, there are enviornments where IE is the only option. It will anger people that they can't view your webpage. So forward every angry email to Microsoft, and tell them to fucking get compliant.

IE8 with highest standards only mode

[Your.Master]

Look at this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx#7202029

There's a regkey setting to force IE8 in standards mode.

Somebody could just mirror the download site with a simple installer that sets that regkey and then calls the real installer, thus distributing IE8 standards-only-mode.

Separation of content and presentation

[KayakFun]

After we were bitten by Netscape 4's layer handling when our company switched to IE6 as company browser, we made W3C HTML our standard. Since testing this in Firefox with the HTML validator add-on is so easy, all of our web programmers are now using Firefox.

Designing for the W3C standard is so much easier than designing for one browser and testing in many others, that we do not have the manpower or will to switch back to the era of browser-sniffing. I'm about to add a disclaimer to my site:

"For maximum viewing experience, please use a W3C compatible browser. Examples: Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc."

All this assumes one browser.

[SanityInAnarchy]

By some defintions it's always been broken, since it doesn't comply with the spec. But users seeing a broken page on a broken browser that looks right doesn't care.

The only reason we are having this conversation is the 800-pound-gorilla in the room -- IE is a fucking monopoly.

Were IE not a fucking monopoly, what would happen is, users would see the broken page in a compliant browser. You seem to agree...

And for the users on a compliant browser it will always be broken regardless of tagging.

But you see, if there was sufficient marketshare for compliant browsers, or if most browsers were mostly compliant, no one would be stupid enough to release a webpage which doesn't work with them. Just as today, people can be called stupid for releasing a page that doesn't work in IE.

Imagine a scenario where there are five browsers, all equally popular. If a page works in four out of those five browsers, do users blame the page, or the browser? If this happens consistently, for a lot of pages, and it's always the same one, don't you think that one browser would be rushing to patch the problem?

And do you honestly think that anyone would have a page that only works in one of the five? That would be like (pardon the analogy) releasing a Ford-only radio, which would actually explode if you put it in a Chevy.

But, you see, IE is a fucking monopoly, so this actually does happen -- people actually do make IE-only sites, targeted towards a specific version of IE. Meanwhile, I try to make standards-compliant sites that render well in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and even Lynx, and I try to be in a situation where I don't have to care if IE is broken -- partly because it is more future-proof, in that if IE ever gets it right, that page will render properly in IE, also.

I'm not usually in favor for defacing...

[Yvanhoe]

... but just for fun, let's replace every page of microsoft.com by a standard-compliant version.

IE8 vs. PHP & MySQL

[Max_W]

In the world of modern computing I know the technology that actually works. It is PHP & MySQL.

It was developed by such guys as Sanja Byelkin http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/sanja.html , Andi Gutmans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andi_Gutmans , and others.

It just works. It was created by these obscure, modest, but incredibly talented people, with minimal resources.

True, the MySQL was bought recently by the SUN. I have no doubt, it will become before long similar to IE8. A show run by MBAs in smart suits. A technology, which works not for you, but against you, on the side of the MBAs.

I do not know how to do it, but the world community should learn how to empower the people like Sanja Byelkin and Andi Gutmans. People are sick and tired of the browser monopolies with their incompatibilities, bugs, noncompliances with the standards. Something should be done about it by the world community.

MS has plenty of options

[Anonymous Coward]

a) Upgrade the engine for IE6 and 7 to the IE8 version and make available where IE6/7 was available.

b) Allow IE8 to be installed in replacement of IE6/7 even if this is an "unsupported" platform.

c) Allow IE8 to be replaced by IE6/7 if the user requires it for intranet use.

MS won't like (a) because that makes Windows7 less necessary. So does (b) though it is their problem that the platofrm is now unsupported, not their clients. And (c) makes the upgrade less necessary too.

MS picked this method because it means less work for them and they don't have to make "keeping the old OS working" a more viable routine rather than "pay for a new OS".

Re:MS has plenty of options

[Eskarel]

A) is stupid because that's not how versioning works. If you replace the rendering engine of a browser it's not the same version of the browser anymore. Despite Microsofts rather silly attempts to tie browser verions to OS versions(though mind you 2k needed to go), IE 7 is just the next version of IE 6 just as FF 2 was the next version of FF 1, if you took the rendering engine out of Firefox 2 or 3 and put it into 1, then it wouldn't be 1 anymore, it might not be 3 either but it wouldn't be 1. For the sake of compatibility alone this would be a terrible idea. Internet Explorer 6 should be internet explorer 6, not sometimes 6 and sometimes something else, that's why we have version numbers in the first place so we know what we're dealing with.

As for B Microsoft isn't going to go back and support windows 2000, and they shouldn't have to. Linux doesn't support software for ancient versions of its libraries, neither does Mac, and Windows 2000, while a decent OS was the bastard child of Windows 98 and Windows NT, with neither the security of NT, nor the usability of 98. XP is basically the completed version of Windows 2000, they just gave it a new name. If things keep going the way they are now with all the Vista hating and whatnot, they're going to release IE 8 on XP simply because they'll need to.

This isn't a good solution either because IE 6 and to a lesser extent IE 7 aren't yet standards compliant. If IE 6 stays in the wild it will mean that web developers have to keep developing for it which no one wants to do.

What they need to do, is create a new version of IE(8) which supports the old crap, but also supports standards compliant code, so that intranets and the like still work and people upgrade, but standards compliant code works too and people can start developing that way in future(which as I said before is in their best interest because it's easier to write standards compliant code than to make things work in all the different browsers. According to what I've read about IE 8 this is exactly what they're going to do.

And these will be residing...

[xarak]

in memory of course?

*doubles ram again*

My solution....

[johannesg]

I would propose that Microsoft stops updating IE at all. Revert from IE7 to IE6, even. By leaving the browser market alone, it is guaranteed that:

- IE6-sites continue to work in IE6 for those that need that.
- Standard-compliant browsers will slowly take over, in a gradual process of elimination. Websites can be converted as and when people feel like it, and organizations can use IE6 and a standards-compliant browser side by side as long as needed.

But you do understand what's the point here, don't you? By requiring standards-compliant pages to include a non-standard tag for correct rendering, they make them effectively non-standard. Microsoft is just trying to throw a little spanner into the standards... Again.

Re:as long as they don't touch my tag

[background image]

Blink works fine in Firefox.

The page you've linked to, while depressingly bad, should not have any blinking thing on it for the simple reason that it contains no <blink> element--just a lonely, closing blink tag (i.e. "</blink>"). As far as I can tell (I will not do a thorough investigation...) nothing on that site blinks in any browser...

How difficult can this be ...

[freaker_TuC]

.. where the browser checks out which tags get used in the page -before- displaying the content?

Most incompatibilities will be caused because of tags that are added to such page which are not standard.
If those tags, like the MARQUE tag is present, it could already switch to IE6 compatibility mode.
An extra tag could be forseen to prevent such autoswitching.

Or am I thinking too simple here?

Re:How difficult can this be ...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Some of the problems are in *how* common tags are handled, rather than *if* uncommon tags are recognized.

In other words, if IE8's 'strict' mode handles, say, a table tag differently than IE7, you'll want to be able to indicate how you're expecting the tag to be interpreted.

Not a bad solution, really. Even gives control to *gasp* the developers (who can choose to set or not set the tag) and the end user (who can, presumably, force modes if they so choose.)

This is why I will never get into Web design

[ThirdPrize]

The whole thing is just so f*cked up.

Bite me MS, THIS is the right approach

[fatcop]

Just bump linked to a previous comment that nailed it. I hope this is rammed down MS's throat !!!

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426412&cid=22144738

Tag

[Silicon Mike]

BTW, if you want to get ready for this now, the tag is

MOD PARENT UP!

[sethadam1]

All this whining really shows how little most Slashdotters understand the web. If Microsoft broke all backwards compatibility with the pages designed for IE, it would be suicide. META is NOT a non-standard tag.

People find it difficult to detect abuse.

[Futurepower(R)]

There's a difference between making mistakes and having a corporate culture that deliberately pursues policies that are adversarial toward users. One of those policies, deliberately not following standards, is what started this discussion.

The facts have been the same for years.

[Futurepower(R)]

I haven't repeated myself nearly as much as Microsoft has developed and pursued abusive policies.

Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes.....

[Kaptain Kruton]

...and three time the bugs, security holes and opportunities to divert from standards.

Three Render Modes?

[CrossChris]

Yes! Three render modes - broken, faulty and abysmal!

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[dotancohen]

Here's one

"PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista"

[Futurepower(R)]

Do you realize that the comment to which you linked is in a story about another huge Microsoft abuse titled, "PC Magazine Editor Throws in the Towel on Vista"?

That was not a very effective way to argue that Microsoft is not abusive.

So there's going to be 3 render modes....

[kamikaze2112]

IE 8 Home rendering - $99
IE 8 Business rendering - $149
IE 8 Ultimate rendering - $299

3 modes

[Anonymous Coward]

3 modes: "The good, The bad, and The ugly" :-)

Re:Abuse is all founded on the same mental illness

[gr8scot]

For the size and complexity of the applications that Microsoft produces, they have no more idiocy than anything else. Did you illegally de-compile something or did you just make that up?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/11/1818241

Microsoft has it backwards

[jgoemat]

The default should be to render according to standards. That is the only thing that makes any sense. Microsoft's idea is that most pages are designed for IE6 and therefore would not look right if the default was to adhere to standards in IE8. The onus should be on the site creator though. Pages by default should be written to the standards. If they are specifically written to be viewed with IE6 quirks, then they should have the meta-tag saying "This page designed for IE6". Would it be that difficult for a user to have a checkbox for switching modes in IE8 themselves?

Non standard tags == NON compliant

[Chrisq]

Because the "compliant" mode needs non-standard tags it is by definition non-compliant. The only way to do it is to have the "non-standard" tags to indicate non-compliant mode. True this would mean that the idiots who followed the browser rather than standards would have to add another tag, but that is a small price for compliance.

Next step - "non standard tag fast-tracked for W3C compliance"?

Another idea...

[jeanph01]

Another idea... For those old html pages that cannot be changed (like on cd rom), enable a fonction like this "View this page in the IE6 engine" that could be used on demand.

Re:Not seeing the logic here...

[RollingThunder]

The reason it comes up is because I know damn well what will happen the instant I try to tell the bosses "Nope, can't do that under strict, it requires unofficial extensions/IE bu/etc".

I will either be told to work around it (taking large amounts of time), or be castigated for running in strict.

Thus, it doesn't actually save me any time, not because of any technical reason, but because of business expectations.