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

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

[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.