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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."
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!
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
So, to get IE8 to behave nice, web developers are responsible? huh?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?
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.
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.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
sigh.
<render-like-IE6>
-Dave
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!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
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
... to have the special meta tag required to get the page to render in IE6/7's "Standards" mode.
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!
... 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?
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.
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.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
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
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
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.
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.
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.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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?
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?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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.
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.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
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.
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!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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...
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.