Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
... 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!
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
I like to think of the different modes as:
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
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
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.
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 doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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]
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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".
oh hell! the meta tag switch to turn on standards compliance is non-compliant!
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.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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.
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.
Tweet, tweet.
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?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
Do you repeat yourself a lot?
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.