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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'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.
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
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.
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.