IE8 May Not Pass the Acid2 Test After All

dotne writes "CNET has published an article called Acid2, Acid3 and the power of default. The article predicts that IE8 will not pass the Acid2 test after all: '[Another] scenario could be that Microsoft requires Web pages to change the default settings by flagging that they really, really want to be rendered correctly. Web pages already have a way to say this (called doctype switching, which is supported by all browsers), but Microsoft has all but announced that IE8 will support yet another scheme. If the company decides to implement the new scheme, the Acid2 test — and all the other pages that use doctype switching — will not be rendered correctly.' Microsoft's IE8 render modes have been discussed here previously, and they've caused an uproar in the web development community. According to the scheme, authors must put Microsoft-specific <meta> tags into their pages in order for them to be rendered correctly. I doubt Acid2, nor Acid3 will have Microsoft extensions in them."

Comments

Page specific tuning

[mini me]

It's possible that IE8 will contain code that detects the presence of an ACID test and switches to the proper renderer to pass the test.

Re:Page specific tuning

[ozamosi]

The author of Acid2/3 is not amused by this meta tag. From the tone of that blog post, to me it sounds like he wouldn't shy away from actively try to break a mechanism like that by changing the URI to make sure that the browser that passes the Acid test actually does so for real.

Note, though, that he doesn't say that explicitly, and you shouldn't assume that he will. It's my own conclusion, and you should draw your own, etc...

Re:Page specific tuning

[Z00L00K]

HOW am I not surprised?

But I don't think that we are going to see much of that special tag anyway since those who care about standards will shy it and those who doesn't will ignore it anyway and continue with their broken pages...

But wasn't Microsoft going to push Silverlight (or whatever they call it) instead???

At least - we need this tag and the circumventions for special pages about as much as we need severe dandruff...

Re:Page specific tuning

[termix]

The meta tag is a GOOD idea, they just put it in the wrong place, EXISTING websites should be able to add a meta tag to continue use of the existing quirks mode, and going forward the default could then be acid mode.

With that setup if people really wanted their website to render the old way they could just add a meta tag, and it doesn't mess with the new version of ie

Re:Page specific tuning

[timster]

Forgive me if I'm wrong (as I'm not an HTML guru in the least) but isn't that the point of DOCTYPE? Meaning, if a broken page wants to use the buggy renderer they shouldn't be setting a strict DOCTYPE.

Microsoft is so committed to their long-standing policy of coddling the incompetent that they want a way to be lax on pages that specifically request a strict interpretation.

Re:Page specific tuning

[colmore]

Honestly folks, whatever.

If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.

Re:Page specific tuning

[KevMar]

The issue is that IE6 allowed people to use the strict rendering with out truly strictly rendering stuff. When IE7 was released that was more strict, it broke a lot of pages that assumed that strict worked because IE6 worked.

They already corupted the doctype tag. The logic behind the new tag is to indicate the renderer you want so future releases do not break the current page.

They dont want to break the web again (like IE7 did). So the web will work by default (as defined by IE 6) and new stuff that targets the new browser should not break when IE 9 is released.

They are attempting to end a cycle of new browsers breaking older pages.

What they need to do is do it right the first time and fix rendering bugs quickly. force people to fallow the standard and it will work. Microsoft should be the most accurate implementers of the specs because they have such a huge install base.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the negative effects of the proposed header have nothing to do with who needs to set it and who can rely on the default. Even if broken websites were required to use it to get quirks mode even though a modern doctype is set, the biggest problem would remain: Old, broken pages would not be updated because the server can just set the header and all browsers (not just IE) would have to render the page like IE6 or IE7 ad infinitum. No breakage, no need to update. This is expected behavior with doctypes: Browsers render documents with old doctypes according to the old standard. But the MS header would add another dimension of oddities. Browsers would have to know how to render each doctype combined with each target browser version. That is extra bad because there is no specification how IE6 (or IE7) renders a strict doctype, and there's no public code to look at either.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Metasquares]

As I recall, the reason many pages broke between the IE6 / IE7 transition was because people were hacking up their CSS and the parsing bugs underlying their hacks failed.

Re:Page specific tuning

[yakumo.unr]

Good, as MS's proposed tag is effectively 'quirks mode v2' NOT standards compliance.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Anonymous Coward]

You are totally missing the point. The reason for the tag is they don't want pages that worked in IE6 (the vast majority of the web) to not work in IE8, because then nobody would use IE8. Firefox doesn't need to interpret the tag, because those pages never worked in Firefox to begin with if they need it.

The person using the browser won't give a shit that IE8 renders according to the standard, they are just pissed that they can no longer order their pizza online or whatever the fuck they're doing. To that person it won't be the websites fault, it will be IE8's fault.

In an effort to get to a standards compliant browser for IE9 they are doing this META tag stuff so that pages that used to work in IE6 will still work, and pages that want to be standard compliant can be with the exception of the non-standard header on their page. The reason for this header in addition to the doctype is easy to see: the doctype is for the standard, this meta tag is because of the fact that IE6 was not really using the standard. With IE9 they will probably get rid of the META tag to render properly (HTML5 will probably be the standard anyway and the new pages will have a different doctype) and this whole thing goes away. I don't see the big deal about it, and it doesn't effect any other browsers. It is a one time step to ease the transition from nonstandard to standard.

Re:Page specific tuning

[msuarezalvarez]

So, inwhat way is this new scheme less corruptible than the previous one, pray tell?

Re:Page specific tuning

[argiedot]

My browser passes Acid 2. It displays the following when you visit the page: img except that an internal feature creates the blue mouseover.

Re:Page specific tuning

[S.O.B.]

Here, let me fix that for you:

They are attempting to end a cycle of new Microsoft browsers breaking older pages.

Opera, Mozilla/Firefox don't have this problem so why should Microsoft. By adding a tag that specifies the browser it makes the page browser specific and since we are talking IE it is now OS specific .

Sure a web developer could code other browsers in the tag but it will be ignored by other browsers because other browsers already follow standards and don't require the hint. The metatag might as well be called "IEVersion(tm)" because that's what it is. Once again, Microsoft is trying to make a standard Microsoft specific because they are too stupid, lazy or ignorant to implement what everyone else on the planet has agreed to.

Microsoft has no intention of ever being the "most accurate implementors of the specs" because they have no incentive. Implementing a standard does not make Microsoft more money, tying people to Microsoft products does.

The tag gives Microsoft a get out of jail free card so they don't have to follow standards ever again. Using the tag only reinforces their behaviour.

Re:Page specific tuning

[mcmire]

Okay, but what happens when somebody at Mozilla think it's such a dumb idea that he doesn't want it implemented in future versions of Firefox?

Re:Page specific tuning

[Anonymous Coward]

they don't want pages that worked in IE6 (the vast majority of the web) to not work in IE8, because then nobody would use IE8. Firefox doesn't need to interpret the tag, because those pages never worked in Firefox to begin with

It's even funnier than that. Most of those pages work with Firefox, because the browser sniffing correctly identifies Firefox as a browser that doesn't need all the workarounds which IE6 and IE7 need. The same code will identify IE8 as a Microsoft product and apply all the workarounds, which is what breaks the page if IE8 is not as broken as IE6 and IE7.

The proposed header may be well-intentioned (although I honestly doubt that), but it will have disastrous effects. The tag won't go away, because it has already been explained that it is not just a way of maintaining backwards compatibility now but also in the future. Microsoft expects that a mechanism for targeting web pages to a particular broken implementation of the document type will remain necessary. This can only mean one thing: They don't plan to give IE8 a compliant rendering engine. The header is a way of assuring developers that IE is a de facto standard: "Go ahead and rely on the way IE does it, because if you add this header, you'll never have to correct your page and no matter how wrong your page is, it will continue to work." That of course means that the header will cause more broken web pages to be created.

Re:Page specific tuning

[porneL]

The problem is that currently you can't, and Microsoft only prolongs this situation. None of the existing pages will see the improvements. They've made it easier to keep pages broken than to fix them. Microsoft has decided that the current buggy engine should be the default, forever. You may end up maintaining hacks on pages written for IE7-bugmode long after IE7 fades into insignificance.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Simon Brooke]

Honestly folks, whatever.

If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.

Ah, to be that young and naive again!

Re:Page specific tuning

[jimicus]

As far as I can gather, this amounts to the following:

There exists a perfectly good tag which in essence states "I know what I'm doing; this is the version of HTML I'm using, please render this strictly". This is the DOCTYPE tag.

It turns out that many pages which have the DOCTYPE tag were written by someone who clearly didn't know what they were doing. Thus, they broke because IE6 had a curious definition of what constituted strict rendering.

Microsoft's proposal is an HTTP header which may be embedded with a META tag, the meaning of which is "I know what I'm doing, this is the browser I'm targeting, please render this as per that browser". A mechanism which may make sense if the only browser which has ever existed is IE, and the only thing you need to worry about is different versions of IE, but is completely nonsensical when there are many other browsers which are now garnering enough attention that they're actually getting used and are being accounted for in site development - the only way it can work across the board is if everyone else reverse engineers the rendering model used by every version of IE and re-implements it.

Re:Page specific tuning

[plague3106]

The issue is that IE6 allowed people to use the strict rendering with out truly strictly rendering stuff. When IE7 was released that was more strict, it broke a lot of pages that assumed that strict worked because IE6 worked.

You mean it now correctly implemented the standard, and the web devs that didn't actually follow the standard even though they tried to tell the browser they were got burned.

Re:Page specific tuning

[uzytkownik]

Something like:

What if MS implemented mount as he will IE8:
# mount -o sync -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/c
Do you really want to mount vfat with sync flag [y/N]: y
Please note that untill version x.y.zz sync flag was broken. Do you want to mount with sync flag [y/N]: y /dev/sda1 has been mounted asynchronously

Re:Page specific tuning

[unlametheweak]

Encouraging Microsoft to have it's own proprietary schemes for rendering Web pages is implicitly encouraging bad behavior. I think it is a slippery slope for many people.

On the surface it seems more FUD than anything. If I understand the issue correctly, DTD's are already standard, and software designed to create Web pages will automatically insert DTD's as default. And this is the real issue here; the defaults.

Re:Page specific tuning

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Good. This is a dumb idea and I can't wait to see it fail spectacularly.

Re:Page specific tuning

[noidentity]

It's possible that IE8 will contain code that detects the presence of an ACID test and switches to the proper renderer to pass the test.

Hell, if it's going to do that, why not just have it show a fake "Passed tests" ending screen immediately? Would give it a great speed score too.

Re:Page specific tuning

[ddelella]

An IE specific tag does not mean that it can only run in one browser. The tag simply tells that browser which render to use if it is detected. Other browsers will ignore the tag. Its the same concept as having css which is rendered differently in one browser than an other. There are css specific hacks for certain browsers. This is simply a way of saying you can put this here is you want to...but you don't have to. By default it will render in the old IE6 scheme if you don't supply the tag. I honestly don't see the problem with this. It may actually help sites who refuse to support IE7 because of compatibility. they can now specify the page to load in the old fashion. This way the user base can use the new browsers security and still have older pages work. I am behind this and am looking forward to seeing how well it performs. They just need to get moving a little faster on css3 and make sure that is supported.

Re:Page specific tuning

[F1Rumors]

Strikes me that the meta tag should be used to specify the ACID test that is rendered correctly for that user's understanding.

It is equivalent, in that it identifies the intent of the author in terms of standards, but changes the emphasis (in the same fashion as the DOCTYPE was intended) to put the onus on the browser to render it correctly. Quirks of rendering would be a non-event if the browsers actually rendered the targetted acid tests correctly before being released.

Of course, when coping with browsers that can't render the acid test correctly and require 'quirks' to be included in the code: those quirks themselves should be tagged, so they are correctly ignored by complient browsers.

Re:Page specific tuning

[pizzach]

It sounds more like Microsoft is messing with my code. There is only one way to render the code correctly in most cases with a strict doctype tag. I want my web pages to view correctly 10 years for now; that is what the standard and doctype tags were made for. What Microsoft is doing now is going to fuck that up and it pisses me off.

If you want a webpage to be displayed IE6 style, use the damn HTML4 transitional doctype or no doctype declarations at all.

Microsoft should just continue to improve the standards complaint rendering engine. It's that simple. They can leave the IE6 stuff for the transitional/unlabeled html.

Re:Page specific tuning

[styrotech]

Forgive me if I'm wrong (as I'm not an HTML guru in the least) but isn't that the point of DOCTYPE? Meaning, if a broken page wants to use the buggy renderer they shouldn't be setting a strict DOCTYPE.

Only in a very roundabout way. The actual point of the doctype isn't anything to do with rendering engines - it is how you specify exactly which version of HTML/XHTML/(some other random XML language) etc your markup should validate against.

In terms of rendering engines, CSS doesn't (unlike HTML) have any way of defining which version you are using anyway. The different versions just kinda build on each other, and browsers are supposed to ignore anything they don't understand.

What happened was that when browser makers needed to diverge their rendering engines into quirks mode and standards compliant mode, they figured it was a reasonable assumption that any site that uses a strict doctype is going to the trouble of complying with the standards. So they used the presence of certain doctypes to switch to standards mode. And now that (pragmatic but short sighted) approach is starting to show its warts.

None of this was originally intended by the standards writers - ie people writing standards sort of assume that they are intended to be complied with. So the standards (I think HTML5 might be an exception) don't really allow for providing configurable levels of brokenness in a well thought out extensible way. Actually being able to configure how broken your code is seems a bit strange anyway.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Sciros]

Fair enough, but then they need to think about the fact that right now, if you DO NOT explicitly state that you want IE8 to render pages as IE8, the pages will be rendered in IE7 mode. That's INSANE!

Not breaking the web is a good idea, but if they really want *progress* they will need to make it so that if the meta tag is not included, the browser renders using its own [latest] engine, not the arbitrary IE7. Just thinking about that hurts my brain.

Re:Page specific tuning

[KDR_11k]

Now what I want to know is if there's a "set all styles to random values" setting for this tag just to fuck with IE users.

Re:Page specific tuning

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

Opera, Mozilla/Firefox don't have this problem so why should Microsoft.

My current version of Firefox does not pass Acid2. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Any browser that follows the standard deserves my admiration. Adding more meta tags where this stuff should be in the doc type is not a correct decision and should be reviled.

Re:Page specific tuning

[S.O.B.]

My comment was in reference to new versions of Opera and Firefox not breaking older pages the way a new version of IE does not to the fact that it doesn't pass the Acid2 test. The metatag issue is not about the Acid2 test but about controlling browser rendering in a non-standard, browser/platform specific way.

Re:Page specific tuning

[S.O.B.]

First of all, IE6 will render the pages correctly and if Microsoft correctly recognized the DOCTYPE tag then there really is no reason to create a new metatag for IE7 and IE8. After all, these same pages that would benefit from this tag seem to be correctly rendered in other browsers without needing anything more than DOCTYPE. What's so special about IE7/8 that it can't read and understand the DOCTYPE tag?

And yes, browsers that don't care can and will ignore the tag. But if Microsoft is able to convince web developers to code this metatag by default then that makes it a defacto standard. In effect allowing Microsoft to extend the standard.

Re:Page specific tuning

[KevMar]

This is the exact problem they have.

People write the page with the markup and tags they know work today. People use the retarded work arounds to make the pages look correct in IE. The problem is when the newest and greatest renderer fixes the original bug, the hack fails to work because it uses some unsupported markup/feature.

You should be able to code a page once and have it work forever. That is what microsoft is trying to get back to. This is something people want.

But this is microsofts own fault. They are trying to fix thing now but they have already corupted the standards (by not fallowing them).

Re:Page specific tuning

[Sciros]

And when/if it does break, they *add the meta tag to force the browser to render in whatever worked best.* That's the whole point, locking it into a browser version. But to default to IE7 is arbitrary and bizarre to me. Maybe the guys who coded for IE6 have hairier chests on average, so why doesn't it default to IE6?

I don't mind the approach, I think it's a good one. What I do mind is having pages that don't lock themselves into a browser version by leaving out the meta tag *BEING LOCKED INTO IE7's RENDERING ENGINE BY IE8* anyway. It makes zero sense.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Kamokazi]

What they need to do is do it right the first time and fix rendering bugs quickly. force people to fallow the standard and it will work. Microsoft should be the most accurate implementers of the specs because they have such a huge install base.
Absolutely agree. IE8 should be released without modes, and only operate as standards compliant, and rendering bugs should get the same priority as security bugs. Initially this will break a lot of webpages, but it will force them to change to be truely standards compliant (as long as IE8 is truely standards compliant), and then once FF releases version 3, the major three browsers (Talking Opera, which is already compliant, not Safari...it sucks as bad as IE, any smart Mac user should upgrade) should finally be able to render all pages without switching. And then the browser wars can focus on features, security, and rendering speed.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Duke Blazingstix]

They already corupted the doctype tag.

The DOCTYPE tag was flawed from the beginning. If Microsoft hadn't "corrupted" it, somebody else would have. We are long past the days when computer programmers can rely on other computer programmers to do things "the right way." If you don't believe me, how about A List Apart: http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Your.Master]

http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2008/01/22/i-feel-happy-too.aspx#7203075

They will already do this with HTML5 doctypes (and other unknown but well-formed doctypes), even in IE8.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Waccoon]

The problem isn't that IE is broken. The problem is that there is no good methodology for finding issues in the HTML/CSS you're writing. With so much complaining about standards compliance these days, why don't any browsers, including the self-applauding open-source versions, include a developer panel that TELLS you when something is broken?

That's the problem with markup and scripting languages. People learn how to use them by looking at other people's code, and they never realize that what they're doing is wrong. Compilers will give you warnings. Web browsers stay silent and try to fix your code for you. That might be fine for everyday users, but it is a major disservice to web developers.

Every web browser I've seen is designed from the ground up to display web pages, not author them. Even Firefox requires you to install 3rd-party tools just to give you a visual indicator whether the browser is running in strict mode or not, and you can pretty much forget about tracing parsing errors, broken comments, mismatched tags, missing tags, and so on. Opera is good at debugging Javascript, and will show you pages as if they were on a mobile phone or PDA, but it still doesn't have a built-in author mode for HTML/CSS. The Firefox error console has improved regarding Javascript and CSS, but it still mostly complains about silly things like empty CSS fields. The Firefox error console doesn't even have a hotkey.

I feel that Microsoft is under a lot of pressure not to crack down on strict rendering due to the massive amount of broken code. When the old Netscape was around, it had boatloads of rendering issues just like IE (and it crashed constantly to boot). In my opinion, nobody is really concerned about fixing the actual problem: providing proper authoring tools. Regular people don't need to look at cryptic error messages all day, but if I'm a developer, I'd like to have an option I can enable that will slap me upside the head when I do something stupid.

Now, if IE doesn't know that -22px != 0px, then Microsoft deserves the slap upside the head.

Re:Page specific tuning

[forgotten_my_nick]

As I understand it, if you are following the standards for coding the pages IE8 will not respect those standards unless you have this tag in your web page. So you are forcing the tag onto the developers in order to display their material.

So it is an MS tag to say your compliant when in fact the standards which everyone uses says they are compliant. So it is not good. Personally I'd go with telling people to stop using IE8 when the rendering breaks because MS are too lazy to fix it.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Anonymous Coward]

Using this tag also gives them numbers they can use in marketing to say XY% of websites were written specifically with the new IE in mind.

-M

Re:Page specific tuning

[S.O.B.]

I didn't think of that angle but that's a good point.

Re:Page specific tuning

[holophrastic]

Wow, so many bad bad things.

First off, MS browsers don't tend to break old pages. FF browsers do. Hey, FF stopped supporting alternate print versions in v2. That killed millions. And actually killed as in didn't even load them.

I can't blame MS for not wanting to support standards. Those standards are fabricated by people who don't make browsers. And what's worse, no browser supports absolutely all of them. And even worse, they don't tend to allow for browser-specific custom stuff -- which is how html in general was built: font, upload, blink, marquee, ajax, and countless more.

I've had hundreds more problems with FF rendering than IE rendering. That's because I start with IE, and build FF second. It's been that way for developers since the dawn of time. The primary browser is easy, the secondaries are not. You get to pick the one that you want primary.

But you do have to grant MS one very big thing. Whether or not you like the way they switch rendering engines, or doctypes, or strict modes or whatever, MS is the only company trying desperately not to break millions of pages from 1990. It's a big task to try to keep aging pages alive -- and they are the only ones doing it.

But I'll say again what I've been saying for well over a decade. The day the W3C makes a browser that correctly meets each and every one of their standards, then I'll point to IE and others and say that they suck. Until then, it's the W3C that sucks. I too can invent standards that are difficult to follow.

Incidentally, the W3C did, at one time, have a browser. It didn't support javascript, and it too didn't support most of their standards. So it no longer exists.

Any standards body should be forced to use their standards once in a while -- a proof of concept if you will.

Re:Page specific tuning

[Onyma]

"I've had hundreds more problems with FF rendering than IE rendering. That's because I start with IE, and build FF second. It's been that way for developers since the dawn of time. The primary browser is easy, the secondaries are not. You get to pick the one that you want primary."

And I am the reverse... I develop in FF first and make sure it renders there fine, then I also find that it works well in Opera and Safari 99% of the time right off the cuff... then I go back and fix poor lagging IE by working around it's rendering issues. Heck in IE7 MS ponied up and re-worked many of their known issues admitting they had been lagging behind the standards on their own blogs.

"But I'll say again what I've been saying for well over a decade. The day the W3C makes a browser that correctly meets each and every one of their standards, then I'll point to IE and others and say that they suck. Until then, it's the W3C that sucks. I too can invent standards that are difficult to follow."

So because the FAA doesn't build airplanes they shouldn't set guidelines for manufacturers? And because the FCC doesn't produce any TV programs they shouldn't define guidelines what can be broadcast? How about because GM is the largest auto manufacturer we let them decide how cars should be built and what guidelines they should adhere to? Then all of the other manufacturers could just follow along.

Can you imagine what the Internet would be like if we didn't have organized bodies attempting to set a standard everyone can agreed on? Can we say "free for all"? Can you imagine a world without standards? No broadcast TV signal standards, no adherence to a wireless spectrum rules, heck my telephone probably wouldn't even work outside my local calling area. The W3C is attempting to bring the same form of organization to the web and set one common set of rules that make things inter-operate at an expected level. That is in no way a bad goal or a fruitless effort. Nor should it be ignored.

Re:Page specific tuning

[tzot]

Quoting from the ALA post you linked to:

Now sure, you could just shrug it off and say that since IE6's inaccuracies were well-documented, these developers should have known better, but you would be ignoring the fact that many developers never explicitly opted into "standards mode," or even knew that such a mode existed. This sentence is the basic argument I can find in the complete post that can be considered as justifying your "DOCTYPE was flawed from the beginning", or Gustafson's "The DOCTYPE switch is flawed" (the sentence is a round-up of the previous numbered list where "2. IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change." existed).

I can be accused of quoting out of context, but anyone can read Gustafson's post. I fail to accept the logic: "A switch (DOCTYPE) came into existence; its use suggests that the page developer knows what they're doing. Yet, many developers didn't know what they were doing as they used it, and for that, a specific tool is to blame, a very common tool that failed to understand the switch. Ergo, the switch mechanism is flawed."

I'm sure someone can help me understand this logic. Please do.

Re:Page specific tuning

[holophrastic]

I'm going to say two things: standards are not always good; and the Internet is a free for all and we like it that way and that's why it's grown.

Standards are not always good.

Standards tend to be good for the consumer. They suck for the business and they do nothing but stifle the inventor. I've had to go diving through governments to get access to electrical safety standards to invent a device. I have to follow some of the most stupid guidelines imaginable because they are written to keep all devices everywhere safe. My invention isn't all and it isn't everywhere. But I have to pay stupid amounts of money to have it "certified". I even have to pay for their sticker -- not allowed to just print my own. Oh, and when I buy a house, I still need to hire my own inspector because you can't trust that the house was built properly -- even though there are plenty of standards.

But look at your standards -- the real-world ones. Metric system? Three different imperial systems? On which side of the road do you drive? Every State has a different set of driving rules, and criminal laws, and tax laws. You can't open a small business in Germany without being certified as qualified to do so. Do you agree with the laws of your neighbouring country? Not everyone likes your laws. Not everyone likes capitalism. Democracy isn't better for everything. Would you want a "standard" set of laws?

If the Internet had standards, the first one would be taxes. By allowing every product to be wildly different, you throw off any agency's chance of controlling it. You also allow providers to innovate very different offerings.

Standards only make sense when an industry is so mature that every provider is in the same boat, entry to market is easy, so is exit, and innovation is either at an end, or is a fringe industry in and of itself. FM radio came from one guy saying that AM wasn't good enough. He created FM, and gave away free radios door-to-door with the broadcast schedule to a few radio shows per day. Standards would have killed that before it started.

Regarding the whole W3C making their own browser, yeah, I support that across the board. The FAA should have a "reference airplane". This is what you can do, this is what you can't do sort of thing. Would you trust someone to tell you what to do when they haven't done it? Now, the good thing is that the FAA is composed of industry experts that presumably have built airplanes. Can you imagine if it weren't?

Browsers are wildly different. First, there's no chance of bodily harm. So already government for the sake of safety is out the window. Second, browser development is more research and innovation than development and testing. Why would you want a governing body to restrict the way you can innovate something -- again, it's not like it can hurt people.

Make no mistake, a "standard" is a "government standard". The only question is which government. "Open standards" are little more than the accidental popularity of a technique. You don't have to be different if you don't want to; but you aren't forced to be the same.

The moment you say that a private individual must do something a particular way, it makes no difference what you're discussing. It doesn't matter if it's a company, a human, or a woman. It doesn't matter if it's programming, sex, aircraft or drugs. You're limiting human freedoms. The question is: why?

Now, I'm game for limiting human freedoms when it comes to thigns that are dangerous. Yes airplanes count as dangerous. So do missles and guns and aesbestos. I'm also game for limiting human freedoms when it comes to safety. Driving and rules of the road count.

Questionable things include drinking and smoking and recreational drugs. Whether or not the effects of these count as large-scale safety concerns at the societal level is really beyond my perspective. Browsers are not.

If I choose to program my own browser, you'd better believe that I'll have it support HTML, an

Re:Page specific tuning

[Bungie]

Initially this will break a lot of webpages, but it will force them to change to be truely standards compliant (as long as IE8 is truely standards compliant)

If IE 8 broke a lot of pages it would be even worse. Users would stick with IE 7 to avoid broken pages. Developers with broken code would promote sticking with IE 7 to avoid having to fix it. In the end people will be slower to adopt the more compliant browser, sticking with the broken implementation longer.

People will always choose compatibility over standards. As soon as something breaks they'll move or stay with an inferior but working system instead of dealing with the problems.

For example, in the Netscape/Internet Explorer 3.x days there was an issue when developers didn't close tags properly in a table. Internet Explorer would attempt to render the table. Netscape followed the standard and wouldn't render anything. People viewing sites with broken table code moved towards IE because they could view pages that didn't work in Netscape. No one cared that they were writing or viewing broken code.

Re:Page specific tuning

[cnettel]

IE is special because the mess is frequently created by a sloppy DOCTYPE and browser detection. That is, the version that IE gets, through CSS hacks and possible server-side user-agent detection, is not strict, while the one that Firefox sees might actually be strict.

And 100000 slashdotters...

[geminidomino]

shout "SURPRISE!" in unison.

Re:And 100000 slashdotters...

[sjaguar]

I have to ask, is that in binary? :) Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if IE8 doesn't pass. But, I would be surprised if IE8 explicitly looks for the Acid page when rendering.

Re:And 100000 slashdotters...

[QuietObserver]

Maybe they should shout "Supplies!"

Re:And 100000 slashdotters...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was actually thinking more along the lines of Quel Surprise

Re:And 100000 slashdotters...

[geminidomino]

Same emotion, different language.

q.v. also
"There's a shocker"
"Whodathunkit?"
"I never would have guessed..."
"There's a big surprise! I think I'm gonna have a heart attack and die from that surprise"

Steamrollin' On

[flaming error]

> I doubt Acid2, nor Acid3 will have Microsoft extensions in them.

But lots of web pages will.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[Yetihehe]

My pages WILL have them, if it's easier to make render them correctly than custom hacking. I may not like IE8 but my clients will use it and they will require that my pages work ok on ie(6|7|8), firefox and opera.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[kestasjk]

Isn't that what standards are for?

Re:Steamrollin' On

[filbranden]

they will require that my pages work ok on ie(6|7|8), firefox and opera.

Then the tag won't serve your purpose. It won't make IE6 or IE7 render like IE8 would. The objective of the tag is the opposite, is for newer versions keep rendering broken pages as they render in broken versions of the browser.

As long as you'll need to support IE6 (or IE7 for what it's worth) you won't need the tag at all.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[Dunrobin]

I may not like IE8 but my clients will use it and they will require that my pages work ok on ie(6|7|8), firefox and opera.

Sigh. Ain't that the truth! Customers can be such a pain sometimes. ;D

Re:Steamrollin' On

[Anonymous Coward]

Your clients use IE 8?

Wow, for Windows users, your clients sound surprisingly aware.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[typobox43]

Pages will have to be continued to be coded in a "broken" manner to support IE6/7. Hence, those pages would need this new tag to work on IE8.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[zoips]

You've got it backwards. By default IE8 renders in IE7 quirks mode, not in any standards mode. If the tag isn't there, you get IE7 quirks. If it is there and it says IE6/IE7, you get quirks. Only if the tag is present and says IE8 do you get standards mode.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[Your.Master]

No, that's not right. If the tag is quirks, you get quirks. If the tag is IE7, you get doctype switching between quirks and IE7 standards mode. If the tag is IE8 or higher, or edge, then you get IE8 standards mode.

Re:Steamrollin' On

[jhol13]

Mine too,

I sincerely hope Mozilla team will ignore the tag ...

Re:Steamrollin' On

[remmelt]

Correct. But also, as long as you need to support IE6, you're screwed and will forever need a separate stylesheet for it. Gratefull for conditional comments, we are.

This just in....

[PPH]

... Microsoft ignores standards, goes off in their own direction.

News at 11.

Re:This just in....

[LrdDimwit]

In order to implement the standard, it was necessary to extend it.

Re:This just in....

[Frosty Piss]

Ever looked at web code from Google? Pass all the "standards tests" do they? Noipe, didn't think so. Google ignores standards, goes off in their own direction. News at 11.

Re:This just in....

[allanw]

Embrace, extend...

Re:This just in....

[GuldKalle]

1) embrace 2) extend 3) ?? 4) Profit!

Re:This just in....

[Fozzyuw]

Microsoft ignores standards, goes off in their own direction.

Actually... It's the web standards community that gave Microsoft the green light to go off in their own direction (and hoping other browsers will do the same).

IE8's new scheme and those supporting it are being met with an equal level of criticism.

Yeah, if you're a web designer, it's best you read the stuff that's flying around out there. It's an pretty big and important change being proposed for web development standards.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:This just in....

[uzytkownik]

They never stated they do - MS stated that IE8 will pass ACID 2.

Re:This just in....

[Anonymous Coward]

They never stated they do - MS stated that IE8 will pass ACID 2.

And it will - under certain conditions. M$'s statement is factual.

Re:This just in....

[ThePromenader]

No, it won't - and it is the test that sets its own rules and conditions, not MS.

The Acid2 test is for any and every browser. Bare-bones code, no cheating allowed. Or do you really think that the Acid2 test page will stick MS's meta tag into its header? Not. So unless it renders correctly by default, IE8 will fail. Period.

Re:This just in....

[jp10558]

I'm trying to read the http://www.zeldman.com/2008/01/22/in-defense-of-version-targeting/ page, but get error 400?

Re:This just in....

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried it (Thurs. 11:51am CST) Worked for me.

Already mentioned in a slashdot comment

[doofusclam]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426412&cid=22144084

Amazing

[idontgno]

Another Microsoft "We'll do it our way, and you'll do it our way too if you know what's good for you."

I wish Microsoft would at least learn to fake sincerity in actually following common standards. This isn't even lip service. This is "We follow standards (for certain Microsoft-centric values of 'standards')."

Of course, the market has rewarded them, so why should they change? All they need is smoke, some mirrors, and some moderately-skilled PR, et Voilà! "standards-compliant!"

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

I think you're missing the point somewhat here, as are a lot of people. The core issue is that Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner by not following the specifications in the past. This makes it difficult to follow the specifications today, as all the pages that expect Internet Explorer to deviate from the specifications will break if Internet Explorer starts following the specifications.

They solved this in the past by inventing doctype switching, which is a pretty poorly-thought out hack, and with conditional comments, which uses non-standard syntax. This approach, on the other hand, uses standard HTML syntax and is designed for this purpose.

Far from being "A Microsoft extension to HTML" as some people are describing it, this is an attempt to retain backwards compatibility while fixing Internet Explorer to more closely follow the specifications. It does this using the standard HTML way of incorporating additional metadata. Let me repeat that: what you are seeing is Microsoft improving conformance with the specifications. The mechanism they are adding is so that older code doesn't break, which is an entirely reasonable thing to want.

If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it. Sure, it's their own fault they are in this mess, but bitching about their past behaviour doesn't mean that this attempt to fix things is the wrong approach. Microsoft are doing the right thing here.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

I will make peace with Microsoft on this issue in exchange for one olive branch:

If this is, in fact, a transitional measure strictly to go from the crapfest of past IEs to IE9 being fully standards compliant then I will accept it. It is possible that it's a legitimate crutch to get them out of the mired, non-compliant mess that is IE 6 and 7. But if they don't kick that crutch out by IE9's release, the web development community should do whatever it takes to basically destroy Microsoft's image on the web.

Re:Amazing

[yo_tuco]

"...all the pages that expect Internet Explorer to deviate from the specifications will break if Internet Explorer starts following the specifications."

Is this really a problem? I've been surfing without IE for years. I rarely run into a site that is IE only these days. And if it is IE only, BFD. I just don't come back. What better motivation for a webmaster to update their page than have people stop visiting.

Re:Amazing

[arotenbe]

Please see this comment and my response.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is used for business too. BFD if some little shit site doesn't work in IE8, but it is a problem if corporate websites that businesses rely on can't work in IE8. Nobody will use it.

Re:Amazing

[jwthompson2]

My solution would be to screw "backwards compatibility." The notion that we always have to maintain support for old software is just dumb. At some point we have to decide to abandon the old busted crap and move forward. Certainly this approach to maintaining backwards compatibility is better than non-standard crap like has been used in the past but, really, at some point backwards compatibility should be sacrificed in favor of progress. Most others do this in some fashion. We even have a word for it: deprecation.

Re:Amazing

[azskanker]

A List Apart actually has a couple of articles up about this very issue: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets I, for one applaud Microsoft (I don't get to say *that* very often) for actually innovating here. They've managed to provide a way to make old sites still work (this is actually pretty important...) and move to a more progressive platform for standards support. Basically, Bogtha's right on here.

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

I rarely run into a site that is IE only these days.

I'm not talking about Internet Explorer-only sites. I'm talking about all sites that expect Internet Explorer to behave as it always has; in other words, sites that are compatible with Internet Explorer despite its deviations from the specifications. There are a number of ways in which this could be the case while still being compatible with other browsers, for example user-agent sniffing, conditional comments, syntax hacks, etc.

Re:Amazing

[LordLucless]

No, what they should do is make the custom META tag trigger the backwards compatibility mode, and make it render standards compliant by default. Inserting a one-line meta-tag is so trivial, that any website that's actually being maintained can do it with no trouble at all. It also means that in 5-10 years, that meta tag will gracefully die out, as nobody will need the backwards compatibility code. You're right, Microsoft has made their own bed in regards to ignoring standards. Sooner or later, they're going to have to lie in it, and break backwards compatibility (even just a tiny amount, as I outlined) in order to get on board with the rest of the world.

Re:Amazing

[mixmatch]

Well, in my mind, the easiest way to do this is to change the user agent enough that the pages that render based on the quirks of old IE versions will not do so for IE8. Every serious web developer designs their pages to render both the IE way and the standard way. Maybe thats too complicated for Microsoft?

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

My solution would be to screw "backwards compatibility."

So in other words, you don't have a solution that can satisfy both constraints at once and would rather drop one of the constraints? You have the right to that opinion, but that doesn't mean you think that this particular mechanism is wrong, it means you think that their overall strategy is wrong.

At some point we have to decide to abandon the old busted crap and move forward.

I completely agree. But you are advocating doing that without any transition period where both rendering engines are available. I don't think that's at all sensible.

really, at some point backwards compatibility should be sacrificed in favor of progress. Most others do this in some fashion. We even have a word for it: deprecation.

Name one browser that has removed support for the <font> element type, which was deprecated over a decade ago. Or look at how many browsers use doctype switching to retain backwards compatibility.

Re:Amazing

[zcat_NZ]

Microsoft already have conditional comments.. IF IE6 do funky IE6 hacks, if IE7 do funky IE7 hacks.. Otherwise (no special tags at all) assume standards-compliance.. which would cover MSIE8, Firefox, Opera, and all other browsers.

Why do they need to pollute the standard with yet another tag? If they'd just use conditional comments then as IE6 and IE7 get phased out we'd all be able to just do plain old HTML with NO nonstandard tags and expect every browser to render correctly..

Why do Microsoft still insist that every page on the web must do 'something special' to get their browser to render properly?!! It would make more sense if people had to do 'something special' to make MSIE behave like older versions.

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

If they'd just use conditional comments then as IE6 and IE7 get phased out we'd all be able to just do plain old HTML with NO nonstandard tags

You have it backwards. Conditional comments use non-standard syntax. This new <meta> element approach uses the standard HTML and HTTP methods of providing metadata.

Re:Amazing

[Flossymike]

I understand the need to try and keep backward compatible webpages however I think it could be done without introducing any new tags. Why not make it the doctype of HTML5?

Just my 2p

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

Inserting a one-line meta-tag is so trivial, that any website that's actually being maintained can do it with no trouble at all.

The problem is that a great many websites aren't maintained.

It also means that in 5-10 years, that meta tag will gracefully die out, as nobody will need the backwards compatibility code.

There's nothing stopping them from making that the default for Internet Explorer 9. But this is a major new rendering engine, switching to it by default when it is totally unproven is a really bad idea.

Re:Amazing

[AeroIllini]

If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it. You're right. With those two constraints (backwards compatibility and standards compliance) this is the best way to go.

However, I don't agree with the first constraint. Backwards compatibility should not be an issue here. Period. They should have set the non-standard flag to invoke non-standards mode. Then all the pages that want to keep rendering in IE 6/7 can simply set that flag (since it's an HTTP header, you can just set it on the whole domain and be done with it) and move on with their lives. But on the plus side, any new webpage will have incentive to code to standards, because now all the browsers would support a single codebase (something that has not happened since back in the Mosaic days). No more coding for specific browsers, ever.

And don't give me that crap about old websites that are no longer maintained. Sites coded specifically for IE 4 and Netscape 4 break in IE 6 and Firefox... should we be crying over that? Give me a break. If it's no longer maintained, then why are you still using it? Maintained websites will update their code for the new version of IE every time, just like they did for IE4, IE5, IE6, IE7...

Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that.

Re:Amazing

[LordLucless]

MS required a bigger change to websites earlier, when they deliberately broke IE6 as a result of the Eolas dispute. If they can break their browser to get around patent disputes, but not to comply with standards, it just shows where their priorities are.

But this is a major new rendering engine, switching to it by default when it is totally unproven is a really bad idea.

The idea is that MS would test their engine before shipping. A bit of an assumption, I know, but that's the theory.

Re:Amazing

[zcat_NZ]

Microsoft have it backwards;

    Special Microsoft tags of any kind == Microsoft weirdness that we have to work around.

    no special tags of any kind == assume standard HTML

We should be at the point where people can write W3C-standard html and then add a few conditional comments to deal with MSIE7 and earlier weirdness... and as MSIE7 gets phased out we'd then reach a point where we can write W3C-standard HTML with no 'Microsoft' tags at all, and have it render correctly in any browser.

But noooooo, that would be too obvious.

Re:Amazing

[10101001 10101001]

Far from being "A Microsoft extension to HTML" as some people are describing it, this is an attempt to retain backwards compatibility while fixing Internet Explorer to more closely follow the specifications. It does this using the standard HTML way of incorporating additional metadata.

Out of curiosity, what would this "additional metadata" be? The general complaint, as I understand it, is pretty simple: instead of supporting specification X properly, Microsoft is supporting specification X' when it sees data in specification X format, with the ability to render specification X properly if you throw in some extra metadata. Now, this is entirely *backwards* to how you follow the specification. If Microsoft wanted to, say, support specification X and add metadata to support their own custom, non-standard X', that'd be up to them, and I don't think people would be upset. But, at the point that Microsoft demands that you add in extra metadata *outside the specification* just so that a document will render properly, Microsoft has effectively redefined the specification. That, around these parts, is known as "embrace and extend". It also smacks of them being able to really claim they, for example, can pass the Acid2 test.

If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it.

And if you have a better idea on how to end the use of illegal drugs in the US... Have you ever considered that when people complain about the War on Drugs or Microsoft's lack of standards compliance that there's a reason? Have you ever considered that you can't simply redefine the situation--built-in with a set of assumptions of what must happen--to ignore the valid complaints that wish to evoke change away from what is happening?

Sure, it's their own fault they are in this mess, but bitching about their past behaviour doesn't mean that this attempt to fix things is the wrong approach.

It is the wrong approach. The *right* approach is working to be standards compliant, backwards compatibility possibly be damned. And if Microsoft fucks up again (not that I'd blame them, since it's really hard to be standards complaint as standards are almost always ambiguous), they can break compatibility again moving from IE8 to IE9. The end goal is to move as many people to writing standards complaint pages as soon as possible. If people really want to, they can continue to run IE7 or IE6 (although MS sure can try to fight it) to view older data. The longer that non-standard compliant browsers exist, the longer *new* data is written out of compliance and that only further delays having a platform-independent information medium.

Microsoft are doing the right thing here.

Not so much.

Re:Amazing

[porneL]

They encourage keeping pages broken (and broken in a way that's best for IE only) rather than getting sites and browser move to standards. IE5 is dead now, but its legacy quirksmode is thriving. With this switch IE7's bugs get chance for immortality too.

If they'll keep adding new bugmodes with each release (and this syntax makes it possible), they will create anti-competetive situation, where they can keep 100% compatibility just by freezing their engine, and forcing competition to reverse-engineer and implement each of their past mistakes.

There are plenty of alternative solutions, but none of them are so weasly and self-serving as this one.

• Like other vendors, they could release betas early or even keep nightlies continously, to allow webmasters to prepare for future changes.
• They could default to real-super-duper-standards mode and use magic tag only to regress on pages that ask for it. If there was preference/registry key that switches IE8 to IE7 engine, their beloved "corporate customers" could remain blissfully unaware of technological progress.
• They could detect hacks and popular broken scripts and regress only then. It's not difficult (you can smell conditional comments and * html hack mile away). Opera successfuly does something like that with browser.js.
• They could draw a line by changing User-Agent to "Internet Explorer/8.0 Windows/5.1", hiding likes of document.all, and reading pages like all decent browsers do. They would give up "privilege" of being allowed on worst of the IE-only sites, but that's good for open web and good for fair competition... thus absolutely unthinkable for Microsoft.

Re:Amazing

[Ultronator]

Why do Microsoft still insist that every page on the web must do 'something special' to get their browser to render properly?!! It would make more sense if people had to do 'something special' to make MSIE behave like older versions. How would that make more sense? That would cause everyone who wrote a website between 2001 and 2007 for ie6 or ie7 to have to go back and add <insert special tag here> to every one of their web pages just so those pages would use the rendering engine of the older ie browser, they were originally written for, in ie8.

On the other hand, if you are building a new website, then you should have no problem adding in one extra tag because you are going through the trouble of making sure the pages render correctly in all browsers anyway.

Meta tags have always struck me as sloppy anyway. And it's not like they're asking you to add something new to the top of the page that replaces the doctype. Adding something as trivial as an extra meta tag to your "new website" should be a non-issue. But backwards compatibility being preserved for a newer version of a browser viewing older web pages without forcing a developer to update all those old web pages makes the most sense to me.

Re:Amazing

[19thNervousBreakdown]

You're like the nerd that doesn't see the trap coming when the prom queen asks him out.

IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. NO QUARTER FOR MICROSOFT.

Re:Amazing

[jwthompson2]

Yes, ignore one of the constraints. In my opinion, trying to satisfy everyone all the time is just stupid. I prefer the approach of "just do it right" and when you do screw up and do it wrong "just fix it." This runs contrary to so many attitudes in the world of browsers and even the wider world of FOSS which want to maintain "legacy support" even if it costs us progress. Transition periods will occur naturally as people upgrade and migrate on their own time tables. Web designers/developers will participate in the transition period via their designs and solutions to the transitional issues. Browser makers should focus more on making their browsers better not figuring out how to smooth the transition which when you're talking about multiple rendering modes and other solutions of that sort really just cause the software to get bloated and harder to maintain, and that isn't going to help us progress either.

Re:Amazing

[Antique Geekmeister]

I have an idea: take the Microsoft web tools that are designed to use such absurd behavior by default, and fire anyone caught using them. Or at least emblazon the top bar with an unremovable panel that says "Test This Page With Lynx", to avoid the use of HTML extensions to create a graphical experience instead of making the data legible and navigable. Visual Studio is a good example of such a tool.

Slashdot is a good example of how to design pages correctly. If you need to get more complex than this, you're usually doing something badly wrong in your web design. The result of the clean coding is not so pretty at the presentation to the VP who likes paisley as a background, but reduces the load on your network bandwidth and massively improves performance for the guests who actually read your website.

Re:Amazing

[zcat_NZ]

That would cause everyone who wrote a website between 2001 and 2007 for ie6 or ie7 to have to go back and add to every one of their web pages just so those pages would use the rendering engine of the older ie browser, they were originally written for, in ie8.

If they'd written them in standard HTMP and then added some conditional tags to work around bugs in IE6 and IE7 _only_, they would not have to do a thing. The documents MSIE8 is sent would be standard HTML, MSIE8 would render them 'correctly' because it would be expecting standard HTML. And if they made the ASSumption that all versions of MSIE are always going to have the same bugs, they'd just have to go back and make the conditional tags a little more specific.

Re:Amazing

[Bogtha]

MS required a bigger change to websites earlier, when they deliberately broke IE6 as a result of the Eolas dispute. If they can break their browser to get around patent disputes, but not to comply with standards, it just shows where their priorities are.

In the face of half a billion dollars in damages awarded by the court! How many people here have criticised Microsoft for ignoring court decisions? But when they actually respond to a court case, suddenly it's evidence that they don't want to follow standards? Get some perspective. When they settled the case and obtained a license, they put Internet Explorer back to how it was before too. Hardly the flagrant, unnecessary incompatibility you make it out to be.

The idea is that MS would test their engine before shipping.

When you have to be compatible with an entire world-wide web's worth of documents and applications, it's impossible for any organisation, even Microsoft, to test adequately. New rendering engines break things, even a theoretical perfect rendering engine would bring to light ambiguities in the specifications. "Microsoft should just test it" is not a feasible approach.

Re:Amazing

[SL Baur]

I think you're missing the point somewhat here, as are a lot of people. The core issue is that Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner by not following the specifications in the past. I think you have part of it right, just complete the thought.

First, Microsoft only does things to further their own goals. This is not a matter for the convenience of non-Microsoft developers. This is an internal engineering decision for the benefit of internal Microsoft Windows developers same as the paragraph-spacing-for-word96-for-macos "tags" in MSOOXML.

Second, Internet Explorer is a critical operating system component. Moreover, it functionally has a similar role to that of the Unix shell. As such, its defaults for how it renders HTML is a fundamental system interface. Nobody is perfect here. As an analogy, consider how on Linux systems, /bin/sh is usually a link to bash, then people write shell scripts with #!/bin/sh and then use bash extensions, which of course breaks when a Posix compliant /bin/sh exists. See we can make the same mistake too. The difference is that the Microsoft engineering team can't just tell apps to fix themselves (or have the users recompile the now-broken app). They must support the old interface in the same way that they have to keep other ABIs compatible.

Do you see how this makes sense? IE8 can't break IE6 stuffs because that's a critical O/S interface that too many internal components rely upon. We can just say "You're an idiot. If you must use bashisms in scripts, you must also use #!/bin/bash #!/bin/bash-4.0.6 or whatever." Microsoft doesn't have the same luxury.

Defaulting to IE6 behavior makes total sense if you think of it this way. So what would you rather have, standards compliance when viewing web pr0n and a non-functional MS Windows O/S (which probably cannot boot far enough to even get to the point where you can look at pr0n in the first place) or having your O/S continue to work as it has?

As a general engineering solution, relying on specific version numbers to control behavior went out of fashion a couple decades ago. I'm not surprised other browser developers are not enthusiastic about the idea. However, I'm also not surprised to see this kind of thing in an end-to-end controlled environment where you can trace specific desired "non-standard" behavior to a specific version number and act accordingly.

I will now present the source code to Internet Explorer 8:

#include <ieglobals.h>
extern int getDesiredIEVersion(int, char **, char **);

void main(argc, argv, envp)
int argc;
char **argv, **envp;
{
    switch (getDesiredIEVersion(argc, argv, envp)) {
    case 6:
    default:
        ie6_main(argc, argv, envp);
        break;
    case 7:
        ie7_main(argc, argv, envp);
        break;
    case 8:
        ie8_main(argc, argv, envp);
        break;
    }
}

Re:Amazing

[SL Baur]

However, I don't agree with the first constraint. Backwards compatibility should not be an issue here. Period. Agreed. This only makes sense when thinking about IE as a critical O/S component.

And don't give me that crap about old websites that are no longer maintained. Agreed. This only makes sense when you think about API between various O/S components (which are static and cannot be changed).

Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that. Agreed. Disagreed. Disagreed. Agreed.

This is all about keeping Microsoft Windows itself afloat. The decision to make a browser (and a non-standard one at that) a vital O/S component was not a good engineering decision, but it made sense to management at a time when Netscape Must Die. I posted a longer analysis earlier.

Re:Amazing

[wikid_one]

Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but... How does making IE standards compliant break webpages? If a webpage renders properly in another standards compliant browser, then why would it fail in a standards compliant IE?

Re:Amazing

[the_B0fh]

It's called a fscking web server for a reason.

People, it's *NOT* rocket science.

It's not that difficult to tell the web server "if detect IE6|IE6, insert fuckuptag".

Jesus H. Christ - is this the IT talent we have in place today?

Re:Amazing

[Your.Master]

It breaks non-standard webpages. This HTML exists on the web (particularly in unmaintained sites), in corporate intranets, on CDs like encyclopediae, and in many 3rd party software packages. These are problems mostly not faced by IE's competitors.

Re:Amazing

[AeroIllini]

Movement towards standards compliance is a good thing, but Microsoft is not doing that. This is a thinly veiled way to keep every web developer coding specifically for IE, every time they write a website. Microsoft is the center of the universe, and all that. Agreed. Disagreed. Disagreed. Agreed.

This is all about keeping Microsoft Windows itself afloat. The decision to make a browser (and a non-standard one at that) a vital O/S component was not a good engineering decision, but it made sense to management at a time when Netscape Must Die. I posted a longer analysis earlier. Actually, that should be "Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed." When I said "keep every developer coding specifically for IE", I meant exactly what you said: the end goal is to keep people using Windows, since IE and Windows are inseparable. Sorry if that was unclear.

Re:Amazing

[coolGuyZak]

If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it

Two things immediately come to mind:

• Implement the doctypes properly & strictly, use the meta tag for non-compliant pages. Old pages merely need to add a single line to their header to work. New developers no longer need to differentiate between browsers [sic].
• Implement a "broken" doctype, broken pages merely need to switch their doctype.

Users will quickly identify which sites are broken, and at least a few would contact the maintainers of those sites. Maintainers don't need to do much work to get their site to work*. Yet, new sites don't need to add IE specific markup.

--
* For static sites, use script du jour. For programmed sites, add the meta in the code.

Re:Amazing

[LordLucless]

In the face of half a billion dollars in damages awarded by the court! How many people here have criticised Microsoft for ignoring court decisions? But when they actually respond to a court case, suddenly it's evidence that they don't want to follow standards? Get some perspective. When they settled the case and obtained a license, they put Internet Explorer back to how it was before too.

They haven't put it back to how it was before. They plan to, some time in 2008. Which will mean it will have been broken for 2 years. MS had a choice - it could have settled the matter with Eolas, or it could have fought tooth and nail, and in the process, piss off every developer that had an embedded object somewhere in their site. They chose to take the fight, and piss off the developers. The change required to hack around the activation junk MS put in to step around the patent was much more significant than adding a meta tag.

Microsoft have never had a problem with making website developers clean up after their mistakes before. I doubt it's their concern for them now that's influencing their decision. They're just doing whatever's convenient for them at the time, just like they did in the Eolas matter, software quality be damned.

When you have to be compatible with an entire world-wide web's worth of documents and applications, it's impossible for any organisation, even Microsoft, to test adequately

You don't have to test it against the whole www. You have to test it against the specifications. That's what they're there for. The backwards compatibility meta tag would be there for that part of the www that required backwards compatibility. They don't need to test that - just plug in their existing render engine (which they're already doing). But if they're going to promote IE8 as ACID2 compliant, well then, I damn well expect them to test it such that they know it is ACID2 compliant.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, and in doing so they are actually doing web developers a favour.

However strict the specs may be, browser implementations differ from application to application and from version to version, and seeing your application break each time a new version comes out, or your client switches webbrowser, is a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved. Telling the new webbrowser that you want it to revert to the old rendering engine may not be the "fancy" way to solve this problem, but it certainly helps web developers to upgrade gracefully instead of with a distressed phonecall from a client.

A list apart has a nice article on this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

Also, we should look at this in the longer run. Sure, IE8 will need a tag to conform to standards for backwards compatibility, but by the time IE9 or IE10 or whatever comes out the web should have migrated to standards for the most part, so then they will (or should) conform to standards by default. If they don't do that then, we can flame them honestly. For now, this is probably the best approach.

Re:Amazing

[forgotten_my_nick]

"what you are seeing is Microsoft improving conformance with the specifications."

erm no. By default IE8 is going to render non-compliant and you have to put the tag in to get it to switch on. If they were improving conformance they would do the reverse.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes it difficult to follow the specifications today, as all the pages that expect Internet Explorer to deviate from the specifications will break if Internet Explorer starts following the specifications.

I think you meant "all pages that expected Internet Explorer to ignore W3C standards forever".

If people are too stupid to code for IE6 only, it's their own problem. This is Microsoft's attempt at giving these folks a "get out of jail free" card, and I'm not giving it to them.

If you code to standards, test in Firefox, Opera, Safari, then patch (via Microsoft conditionnal comments) your CSS for specific versions (but not future ones), it's pretty easy and everyone is happy.

Sure we could argue that the new meta tag is only one more line of code that will be ignored by other browsers, but I don't need to use that, the tools needed are already in place. When coding a website, simply assume that the next version of IE "will finally get it right" (and only write IE-currentVersion compatibility in your contracts, then explain to your clients why you did it).

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "conditional comments use non-standard syntax"? To all other browsers and to validators, it is just that: a comment, something to be ignored.

The fact that IE can parse that special IE-only comment is great because it allows us to write IE-only workarounds. Combined with the cascading in CSS, it makes IE-patching relatively easy.

Re:Amazing

[Harik]

Actually, I have a better plan - fuck the idiots who wrote IE6-hack-centric-pages and used a strict doctype. If a page claims strict compliance, render it that way. If it claims nothing, run it in quirks mode. Oh gods no a table-based layout might not look right! These idiots are bitching that their non-compliant websites arn't pixel-perfect in layout, not that it renders a blank page.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well what do you know. It breaks in every case.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, if it's broke, don't fix it!

Make Acid2 the Default

[Ohio Calvinist]

Why not make Acid2 the default? I'm sure the browsers interals could look for IE6/7 "hacks" and provide a icon on the bottom to have it viewed in compatibility mode? If the broken mode is going to be the default, I think standardization will be slow, unless common developer tools like MS Visual Studio and Dreamweaver put in the MS Specfic renderer tags in by default.

I think we're at the moment when developers want standards, where in the IE4/NS4 war, everyone and their brother was trying to hack-together web pages, and IE did some nice exposition of the DOM via the ID attribute in tags, which accomodated less-skilled programmers. Now that the baseline-developer's skills are improved, and the IDEs out there are actually pretty decent (e.g. Not FrontPage, Not MS Word) I'd say the time is right.

While the Acid2 test is niceity, what I'd really love to see is a standard plugin model shared by FF and IE. It has been a while, but I always thought the "EMBED" inside of an "OBJECT" tag was lame. I don't like ActiveX but I get in intranet environments where it can be useful, where the code should be "trusted" and "signed", where you're essentially using a browser to "publish" applications that should probably be desktop applets, or use a native HTML (AJAX?) interface rather than "VB applet on a webpage." That being said, we need an out in the wild, "safe" plugin/viewer model.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[alexgieg]

Why not make Acid2 the default?

Because lots and lots and LOTS of pages would break, among other things. Earlier today there was another article in ./ with a link to the full rationale behind this, and to me is makes a lot of sense. Basically, with this tag you can specify a version for each browser on which the site was tested and is known to work well, then all browsers might keep internally working versions of their legacy rendering engines (or a compatibility mode built in their newest engine, whatever works best in each case), and forever in future you'd have old sites being 100% readable in new browsers, no matter how much actually existing "de facto" and "official" standards change or get deprecated/replaced over time. An example from the above link, specifying the page renders correctly in IE 8's engine, Firefox 3's engine and (say) Opera 4's engine:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem. Sure, it could have arrived earlier, but better later than never.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[orclevegam]

Someone mod parent up.

I admit when I first heard about this in a previous article (in which it was claimed IE8 wouldn't used standards mode UNLESS the meta tag was added), I figured it was business as usual for MS, but after reading the full rational behind this, I think people have misinterpreted the intention. As long as the browser defaults to standards compliant, and only switches to a particular rendering mode in the presence of the meta tag, then this is a useful way to force a page to be rendered in a way you actually intended. This also appears to be a design originating from outside of MS, they asked other developers for suggestions of how to tackle this problem, and the meta tag solution was the one recommended to them.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[ciggieposeur]

I wouldn't mind such a tag if sites would at guarantee usability with really old browsers if the tag is ignored, e.g. the "default" page would run somewhat on Netscape/MSIE 3.x and newer browsers could use the tag to turn on the more advanced features.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[samkass]

It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem.

It's a problem, though, that only Microsoft has. Everyone else is just expected to conform to the standards.

Read here for the WebKit team's response to this and why they're not going to define or obey any such tags themselves.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Your.Master]

Everybody in both threads keeps asking "why not make Acid2 the default". I'm going to focus on this part rather than the rest of your comment (which is interesting). There are several reasons that don't need tinfoil hats in these three links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx
http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype
http://alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets

It's not such an obviously bad solution. It's not necessarily the best solution, either. It's just a solution. One which allows a choice between backcompat (including write once and never worry about tweaking again) and tricky forwardcompat.

Also, see in particular this comment: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx#7202029

There's a regkey to force IE8 standards mode on all sites (including ACID2).

Problem is that there are sites on corporate intranets and for small businesses all over the place that expect IE6 or IE7 behaviour from either all browsers, (or sometimes it sniffs for IE and feeds it a non-standards page). These people aren't going to be happy about adding standards compliance.

This solution means that everybody who renders fine in IE has to do absolutely nothing to update their webpage for IE8. They can if they want to, though. People who don't render fine in IE, well, they now have the workload to make it render reduced to one tiny server config or one line per webpage, their choice. When they make a new webpage, they can opt in with the one simple copy-paste line (yes, I know, OMG evil proprietary HACKS!!!). And then when IE9 comes out...any page compliant with IE8 and before still doesn't need to be touched to render in IE9. And so on and so forth.

Standards will continue to evolve and be created and iterated, and no browser will fully support standards immediately upon their creation (unless there's some standards-incest, or the standard is ultimately lifted from one browser or another). This method allows IE the freedom to fully support new standards in the next version without worrying anymore about backwards-compatibility. Or they can half-implement it in one version and half in the next, or whatever. And if other browsers want to try this versioning on their software, they can. And if they don't, they don't have to. IE is apparently committed to, by default, not fucking up old webpages that worked on earlier versions. That doesn't have to be anybody else's priority; no other vendor is being "forced" to implement this. Code to standards, put IE on edge, and like every other browser it's forward-looking. And if it completely fails to take off, and IE marketshare drops to nearly nothing, then probably IE9 will just render in standards and drop the rest of it.

I think this could actually speed the adoption of standards. If IE8 works without breaking *anything* before, it can have a MUCH quicker adoption than IE7 did vis-a-vis IE6. The IEs, as we know, together still make up a majority of browsers visiting the majority of sites. But if a tonne of them are moving to IE8, then webdevs can code to standards, insert the IE8 tag, and everything will work on Firefox 3, Safari whatever, Opera whatever, IE8 (minus the bugs in all for all of those, which are hopefully minor). And if adoption still isn't quick enough, webdevs can say without shame to the people with IE7 to just upgrade their browser, it's old and deprecated, and they have *absolutely* nothing to lose and standards compliance to gain. Eventually everything is in standards, the 9 people who still use IE6 can't stand the web not working anymore and download IE8 (or Firefox or Opera or whatever), and here we are, compliant at last

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[hr.wien]

What's not to like? This tag allows the people that are writing horrible IE-only HTML/CSS in Visual Studio today to continue their business as usual. There is absolutely no incentive for these people to adhere to standards since the IE7 engine will be kept around for "a couple of web lifetimes" apparently (source). This effectively locks browsers other than IE out of these sites since they won't have this IE7 compatibilty.

Hooray, everybody wins. No, wait, the other one.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Kjella]

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem. Sure, it could have arrived earlier, but better later than never. I do know what all the non-IE users here on slashdot will say, and there's quite a few of them (myself included). First off, it looks like only Microsoft will use this, other browsers seem to have broken compatibility early and often and have a fairly rigorous standards compliance. I'm sure evil tounges will say it's because only a minority use these browsers, but I've not heard any noise over Firefox or Opera breaking pages by fixing things. On the whole they seem to be way ahead of web developers, so the benefit of extending it to other engines is pretty much neglible I'd say.

The possible downside is that precisely because these buggy pages work in IE, noone will bother to fix them. Imagine you're at IE12 and it's now a super anal 99.9% standards compatible browser in IE12 mode. What good will it do if pages still call for IE7 compatibility mode and are still broken on every other browser? That said, between "We won't fix the browser because it'd break sites" and "We won't fix the pages because they work" I think the latter is easier to fix and new code would presumably be written to spec and work in all browsers. So it's something of a percieved downside which I don't think is real.

Now, if I take on my hat as an IE user it's a slam dunk. More pages will work. If I take on the hat as a web developer, I know my pages won't suddenly break (because you were forced to use an IE hack to make it work right in the first place). Also a slam dunk. If I take on the hat of Microsoft, they don't get screaming customers about how they broke the intranet. Also a slam dunk. If Microsoft was really really nice, they'd put in their status line "This web page is designed for a higher version of IE. Please upgrade to ensure optimum performance" too, so we'd lose these buggy versions as quickly as possible.

It's easier to cut the developers loose and let them fix IE than the pains of trying to slowly break IE while not getting killed by angry customers. The sooner they get a standards compliant browser out there, the sooner we can get to *really* fixing the problem.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[cbreaker]

You know, all of that is well and good, but you're missing one thing: If IE8 came along, with NO IE6 bugs mode past what the other browsers do (well, probably better) and defaulted to true standards mode - how long do you think it would take before all web sites were standards compliant?

Besides, the only sites that offer any issues these days are corporate intranet/Appliance administration sites anyways. I can't remember the last time I used Firefox or Konqueror and had any real problems.

Microsoft broke the web with Internet Explorer, and web developers helped them by making IE-Only web sites. I really don't feel bad for any of them, and in the end, I don't think that a major shift to standard web would be that difficult anymore. Six years ago, they couldn't have just CUT to standards, but now? Yea. No problem.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Anonymous Coward]

To be quite honest: if the bloggers are for it, I'm against it. It's come to that.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[msuarezalvarez]

What problem does it solve, exactly? What are browsers not listed in the content attribute of that tag supposed to do, exactly? Are you seriously proposing that all browsers keep all their legacy engines frozen and ship them with their latest versions? Does the tag imply that to be properly rendered the page also depends on the presence of whatever security bugs were present in, say, IE8?

This idea is so absurd and against the idea itself of having standards (a non-standard tag to opt-in for standards support!) that it really makes me dizzy.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Anonymous Coward]

There are more browsers out there than just IE, Netscape, and Firefox, and some of them strive to be standards compliant instead of "you'll make this page look right if you know what's good for you". How would you feel (warning: car analogy) if you pulled up to a gasoline pump and on the pump it had a sticker listing all of the cars (the three best selling models) that the gas worked in and everything else was unsupported? That if your engine exploded or if the gasoline was actually diesel because that's what was easier to carry that day that it was completely your fault and you should just buy a new car? Or what if you buy a new car and it wasn't supported? Should your car manufacturer kept around a "legacy internal combustion mechanism" that is triggered by the type of gasoline in the tank? I have a feeling you wouldn't be so amused.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[hr.wien]

Yeah, I'd be fine with that, but that is unfortunately not how it works. IE8 will default to IE7 mode, and will only be standards compliant if you add the tag telling it you want it to be. That's what the uproar is about. This solution basically makes sure IE7 will be around (and targeted by developers not knowing any better) forever.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[liquiddark]

It's a problem, though, that only Microsoft has. Everyone else is just expected to conform to the standards. But they've given a solution that only affects website developers and admins, and moreover only affects them in a way that should not break anyone else.

Read here for the WebKit team's response to this and why they're not going to define or obey any such tags themselves.
"It's too hard" hasn't ever been a good reason not to implement a feature if it makes your app significantly better for users.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[TheMCP]

What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem.

First of all, I've been working in software long enough to know that I can't trust it for a minute. Oh sure, they may say they're going to maintain all these special compatibility modes, but in reality one or more of the major browsers won't do it, or they'll try but they'll screw it up, or they'll do it for a while and then suddenly drop all the backwards compatibility stuff because they don't feel like maintaining it any more. Regardless, eventually it will come to pass that I can't trust the version specifying mechanism to do me any good, and I'll have to update my pages anyway.

Secondly, it encourages the web to come to a halt, technology wise. As an expensive consultant to big companies, my experience has been that they all want to try to tell you "our web site has to look perfect on every version of every browser ever invented, period." Of course that's impossible, so once I drill it through their head that it's impossible, they have to settle for some major subset, at which time they always want me to use ancient UI technology for maximum compatibility. (Seriously, I deal with people who freak out if I want to use CSS positioning or an iframe, and god help me if I mention AJAX.) If they got the idea that browsers have a magical compatibility mode so that all future browsers will support pages written for today's browsers, they'll instantly write up a corporate policy that basically says that nothing will ever change again and for the rest of time their web site will be maintained as if it is forever 2005, and then they won't change it until someone practically holds a gun to their head to force them to.

Now, you're asking yourself, why should you care? Because it's more than a few idiots, it's a substantial portion of the web. Sure, there will always be little guys who will come along and innovate, but do you really want to deal with a web full of sites that forever use 2005 technology and just a few sites that have caught on to the latest stuff?

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Pieroxy]

dude, as far as i can recall, all major browsers have a quirks mode nowadays...

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think so. In fact I KNOW that they are not the only ones.

The other browsers DO have this problem. They *ALL* have had this issue for years. I remember people trying out 3 different versions of netscape, and 2-3 versions of IE to make sure things looked right. FF has had this issue and Opera itself has had this issue. In the future I can predict it will come up again. Also given that HTML5 is 'real soon now' I can see it happening again.

I do think the default though should be 'edge' if it is not defined though. Making it IE7 by default will not be good...

It seems like a reasonable idea.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[CrazedWalrus]

Besides, the only sites that offer any issues these days are corporate intranet/Appliance administration sites anyways.

Absoutely true. Most of the code out there that will break immediately are probably not professional sites (and therefore only lightly trafficked). They'll be personal sites for the most part with some small business sites thrown in. The first probably won't notice, and the second will get it fixed.

Our company is still on IE6, and they don't move anything without testing for a long time. Intranet sites will be fixed long before IE8 ever hits corporate workstations. Besides, even in our firm, we have lots of unofficial installs of FF, and almost everything works just fine. The ones that don't can be fixed in pretty short order.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[orclevegam]

Yeah, I'd be fine with that, but that is unfortunately not how it works. IE8 will default to IE7 mode, and will only be standards compliant if you add the tag telling it you want it to be.

Do we know for sure one way or another about this? Everything I've seen is extrapolated off the announcement that there would be a new meta tag to select the rendering behavior. I've yet to see a single source that says what rendering behavior IE8 will default to. Any have a link that actually states with certainty one way or another, or is everything just speculation at this point?

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Fastolfe]

forever in future you'd have old sites being 100% readable in new browsers, no matter how much actually existing "de facto" and "official" standards change or get deprecated/replaced over time.

This justification is incorrect. The standards aren't changing, and newer versions of standards should not cause heartache among HTML authors. HTML 4.01 is "frozen" and will never be revised "in-place". There may be newer versions of the same HTML standard, and those newer versions may deprecate things and introduce new things, but HTML 4.01 will always be HTML 4.01. Pages can declare what version of the HTML standard they're written to using a DOCTYPE. Every HTML version has its own distinct DOCTYPE, so no 3rd-party mechanism is needed to determine what HTML version a page is written to, regardless of what newer standards are created that deprecate/replace earlier versions. Browsers should always know how to render HTML 4.01, and over time, that behavior may even be refined. The DOCTYPE should tell them what to do.

What this is about is preserving the behavior of defects and implementation decisions. If developers write their page not to a specific HTML standard, but to a certain set of assumptions about the browser platforms they use to test, as most developers do, a mechanism for them to declare this would seem to be useful.

It's really a trade-off. You can have one of:

Incremental compliance improvements and adoption at the cost of backwards compatibility. Browsers today improve from release to release. Frequently a decision has to be made to be standards compliant, or backwards compatible. Both IE and Firefox routinely decide, explicitly, not to implement certain things according to the standards, because compatibility with existing web sites would suffer. Microsoft would seem to favor backward compatibility more than Firefox, but both do it. Consequently, even though browser vendors could follow the standards, they choose not to do so. HTML authors have to be aware of each browser's quirks and know how to write new web pages that render the way they expect in the popular browser versions.

Better compliance improvements and backwards compatibility at the cost of fracturing the standards. By establishing each rendering engine as a "dialect" within a particular HTML standard, you perpetuate each dialect's quirks forever. HTML authors still have to be aware of each dialect's quirks and know how to write new web pages that render the way they expect in the popular browser versions. They may choose to do that by mastering one specific dialect, and never updating, which means they never get the benefit of new standards, or they may do that by attempting to master all dialects, as though every browser version ever made is still in widespread use. The chief benefit would seem to be that old pages can be left alone forever and be guaranteed to render the way they've always been rendered. The problem comes when someone is asked to make a change to that page. If they don't know that dialect, they're going to botch it. So rendering stability comes with higher maintenance and education costs for your HTML authors. It also has the potential to slow standards adoption. Even though standards improvements can now be absolute, and significant between browser versions, HTML authors are going to be loathe to learn them if all of their content remains in an older dialect. There's just no reason to "upgrade" and lots of reasons not to. Businesses care more about keeping their content available and costs low than "standards compliance".

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Racemaniac]

well, it's not as if they have much choice... it's basically a lose-lose situation for microsoft.
For IE8 they can choose to
- perfectly obey the standards, and break tons of webpages with special IE hacks
- do this little hack, and make it possible for them to make the switch to a standards compliant browser
- (or the easiest solution, leave it as it is, and 90% of the world wouldn't notice or care)

the first option would be suicidal, so they're going for option 2. yes, they brought themselves into this mess, and yes it's not standards compliant, but they have no choice, and i think we can all agree it's a huge improvement... they're doing an effort to comply to the standards, but they simply cannot break all the pages made for IE because of that, they still have some common sense...

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[hr.wien]

Read it and weep, I know I did. (Last 3 paragraphs are the relevant ones.)

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Your.Master]

> You know, all of that is well and good, but you're missing one thing: If IE8 came along, with NO IE6 bugs mode past what the other browsers do (well, probably better) and defaulted to true standards mode - how long do you think it would take before all web sites were standards compliant?

A long time. That's the specific argument I was making. Because if IE8 goes full standards now, with imperfect back-compat, then there are people who will avoid upgrading.

> Besides, the only sites that offer any issues these days are corporate intranet/Appliance administration sites anyways.

And these do matter. Access from corporate browsers is a substantial part of browser penetration and marketshare. If back-compat can be maintained, then they have nothing to lose by upgrading to IE8. If it cannot, then they do have something to lose. And they won't upgrade. And then the web sites will still have to have brutal hacks to take care of IE6 users.

> Microsoft broke the web with Internet Explorer, and web developers helped them by making IE-Only web sites.

That's true, and it's also the past. It's not about feeling bad for Microsoft. It's about the best way to deal with the reality of today. It doesn't even really matter whose fault it is (Microsoft's -- they even admit it in their blog, talking about outright errors in IE). What matters is who will be hurt by their choices here.

Option 1: Make IE8 standards mode the default and old versions opt-in, then it will hurt:

a) Corporate Users.
b) Home Users who use old non-compliant sites.
c) Webdevs who have to once again tweak old sites.
d) Web standards, because IE8 marketshare will not cut into IE6 and IE7 marketshare as quickly. This in turn means webdevs will still have to target IE6 and IE7 and it will still be a pain in the ass.

Option 2: If they make IE7 standards mode the default and IE8 opt-in, then it will hurt:

a) Sites coded to standards without regard to IE (that is, the very webdevs that didn't help Microsoft out) -- actually it doesn't hurt them, it just fails to help them. Actually, it *does* help them, because now compat with IE is a single tag away. So it doesn't really hurt them at all, just helps them sub-optimally. Of course, the other browsers help them optimally, so by comparison they can feel jilted.
b) New standards-compliant sites, in that they will need to paste in one particular tag.
c) Web Standards, because lazy webdevs can still code to the wrong spec and have it work.

Although with 2.c), they could even in this case include the meta tag and continue to code to the wrong spec. There is a third option and that is to not have this tag at all. I don't think that's really wise. I think 1 and 2 up there are the realistic options. I don't pretend that the people harmed in each case is an exhaustive list, it's just top-of-my-head, and I've focussed on trying to see the positive light here, just to play devil's advocate.

Still, I don't think it's at all obvious that choice 2 is better than choice 1. Nor vice-versa, mind you. But choice 2 is how everybody else does it and how it's always been done. It's the de-facto standard, if you will. Doesn't make it necessarily the correct choice.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[orclevegam]

*bangs head on keyboard*

I take it all back, the engineers at Microsoft are utter morons that just do not get it. They took a perfectly good suggestion (the one outlined on alistapart.com) and managed to break it as only MS can. All they would have had to do is make the default mode the standards compliant mode, that's it. Instead we get more of the same. I still like the meta tag for the reasons listed on alistapart.com, but IE8's implementation of it is completely wrong (imagine that, IE implementing something wrong).

P.S. To anyone with some mod points, mod up parent with some informatives, that's a good link and highly relevant to this discussion.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[ianare]

TFA states:

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. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article.

IOW, the browser defaults to 'quirks mode' if there is no DOCTYPE, M$ half-assed 'standards mode' if there is a DOCTYPE, and .... wait for it .... The developer needs to specifically add the meta tag to use 'true' standards mode.
So there you go -- good standard compliant pages will need to add a non-standard meta header to render properly (complete bullshit).

Thankfully for me, the pages I make are intranet use only, and I mandated any browser other than IE company-wide. But I feel a great deal of sorrow for those that do not have this luxury :-(.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Josef Meixner]

The possible downside is that precisely because these buggy pages work in IE, noone will bother to fix them. Imagine you're at IE12 and it's now a super anal 99.9% standards compatible browser in IE12 mode. What good will it do if pages still call for IE7 compatibility mode and are still broken on every other browser? That said, between "We won't fix the browser because it'd break sites" and "We won't fix the pages because they work" I think the latter is easier to fix and new code would presumably be written to spec and work in all browsers. So it's something of a percieved downside which I don't think is real.

It is even worse in my eyes. According to Wikipedia currently (after nearly 3 years) IE7 has barely overtaken IE6. So currently you have to make sure your pages render on both. When IE8 comes out, it will probably take quite a while until it has significant market share and will probably eat into IE7 and not into IE6. So I either have to hack one page which works in all browsers, then I will obviously use the compatibility mode of IE8 as I have to make the page render correctly in IE6 in any case. Or I have to create separate pages for IE6 and IE8 (and then I don't see the need for that meta thing at all).

So if that suggestion accomplishes anything, then that IE8 will have even slower adoption rates than IE7 as now even most web designers won't have a need to use it, as it won't break their pages.

What I find surprising in that whole discussion is, why Microsoft doesn't solve it the way, the other browsers would, by making it possible to install more than one version. Then you can just use IE6 for those few sites which don't work correctly in IE8. Sure, it would cost considerable effort to build an IE6 (or IE7) which would not integrate into the OS and make it impossible to run another version, but in comparison to adding all the quirks of all past versions of the browser to the next one, I know, which solution I would choose.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[jrumney]

There's nothing here for WebKit to obey. If they see a strict DOCTYPE, they just do as they do today and render it strictly. If the page has a META tag specifying that the page is designed for IE8, then hopefully it'll be pretty close to what the page designer expects, since IE8 is supposed to be following the standards, just like WebKit does. If the page doesn't have that tag, then either IE8 will render it incorrectly, or the page is broken just like the few broken "designed for IE6" pages you see today.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[jrumney]

currently (after nearly 3 years) IE7 has barely overtaken IE6.

IE7 wasn't even publicly announced 3 years ago. It is a little over a year (October 2006) since it was released, and some markets still haven't had it pushed over Windows Update yet (Japan is due to have it pushed in about 3 weeks).

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Yer Mum]

If you think about it again you realise that each browser will have to know how to render pages in the same way as the browser(s) and version(s) specified in this new tag.

Should Opera 9 know how to render pages according Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, Safari 2 and Safari 3 as well as IE6 and IE7? No, it's impossible on cost grounds, prohibitively expensive to develop for.

Will MS obey tags for Opera, Firefox, and Safari? What do you think.

Result: Yet more MS lock in, increasing with each new version of IE.

It's for this reason we have standards, and as you can see it's pretty clear why MS wants to break them.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not specifically replying to you. But as mentioned in the comments of the ALA article, MS could provide a specific rendering mode by asking the user.
When a page loads, check if it validates. If so it can use the strict mode. If not can use quirks mode.
In addition, if the default rendering of IExx breaks an old page (designed to IE6 perhaps), it can ask the user "Does this page appear incorrect? If so want to try IE6 mode?" Y/N/Always for this site/
something like that.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[The_reformant]

That said, between "We won't fix the browser because it'd break sites" and "We won't fix the pages because they work" I think the latter is easier to fix and new code would presumably be written to spec and work in all browsers.

I'd wager there is many orders of magnitude more lines of broken html on existing sites than there are in the source code of all the major vendors put together.

Besides Microsoft is doing exactly what the community wants in one respect in that they have an easy to enable standards compliance mode (assuming it is compliant of course). They have an obligation to their *customers* not to break existing intranet apps. The other major browsers to not, by and large, feel this pressure.

Re:Make Acid2 the Default

[Josef Meixner]

Ah, yes you are right. I didn't check thoroughly and only skimmed the wikipage and misread. But still it has been 1.5 years which is still quite long for only ~50%, no?

Does this mean

[Cro Magnon]

that IE8 will disolve in acid?

Re:Does this mean

[Quiet_Desperation]

No, but water will melt it much like the wicked witch of the West.

Re:Does this mean

[denis-The-menace]

you probably meant: "Will it blend?"

IDGI

[the_B0fh]

I don't get it. Why is there such an issue. As a dominant software company, Microsoft should be allowed to do what it wants. After all, what is best for Microsoft is also the best for America.

Therefore, if you are against Microsoft, you must be a terrorist.

Please report yourself to the nearest detention center for correction.

Re:IDGI

[mjwx]

Please report yourself to the nearest detention center for correction.

they are called "patriot re-patriotization centre's for liberating patriotic patriots". Please use the correct term in the future.

Oh, and report there tomorrow morning for re-patriotization.

It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Shove the anti-MS rhetoric in the closet for a moment and think about it.

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.

Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.

That ACID(2,3) tests are designed to test browsers, browsers are not designed to test ACID. As such, ACID should be updated to include the new doctype option for IE.

Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?"

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Phillup]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. Sounds like just the medicine they need for creating browser specific web pages.

In other news, many Americans against government bailout of mortgage companies that made bad loans...

Re:It's the most logical decision

[ushering05401]

On a purely philosophical point... what is the use of having an international standard if the said standard changes based on the whims of a single corporation?

I get your point, and you may have a more real-world-ready opinion than some of us, but I am not ready to concede anything to MS in this regard.

There are other ways MS could address this issue rather than continuing their embrace extend destroy strategies. There is no reason IE specific tags should be required to make a page display according to an international standard.

If anything, broken pages should require tags to inform the browser that they do not conform to standards, and thus require special attention - not the other way around.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[TheSunborn]

but all theese millions of pages pages render fine in firefox, using standard mode so why can't they render fine in ie8?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[A beautiful mind]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.

So? This is a new version of a browser we're talking about. A business is dead nowadays if only supports IE. It means it already has a Firefox useragent detector, which serves up more or less standards compliant HTML. It is really not that hard to add a similar detection for the new IE version if it turned out to be standards following.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Rakishi]

As such, ACID should be updated to include the new doctype option for IE. Given there is is going to be no new doctype, from what MS is saying, this won't be of much use. Of course had you read even the article SUMMARY instead of ranting about how people shouldn't bash MS you'd have known this. Then again you can't karma whore by being reasonable and responding to the actual issue instead of a strawman so I guess that's out of the question for you.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[PJ1216]

That ACID(2,3) tests are designed to test browsers, browsers are not designed to test ACID. As such, ACID should be updated to include the new doctype option for IE. So, if I take a test and don't pass it, the test should update itself to include my wrong answers?
ACID is designed to test a browser's adherence to a set standard. Its not designed to just 'test' a browser to see if it works. It's designed to see if it works the way a browser should. I say break the millions of web-pages and force them to get updated.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Richthofen80]

Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to.

Well, MS can't introduce a new doctype. That would mean that FireFox and Safari would also have to be on board with the new doctype, and make their browsers comply. IIRC, you can only serve one doctype, and providing an unknown or bad doctype will cause most browsers to render in the least-standards-based, most fugly way. (Quirks Mode, I believe is the term).

The META tag they're proposing is the most risk averse path for them. It will break the least amount of apps and pages, and other browsers will ignore it and render as they previously did.

This is kind of a bummer, since it means that companies and individuals won't have any impetus to change to standards based code. People were mad when MS drove the industry in a certain direction with its browser. Now that standards exist, I think its okay for them to drive it again, as long as the direction is standards-based.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Runefox]

Well, if standards compliance is going to break web apps, then why not just implement the new tag as a compatibility mode flag to activate the IE6/7 quirks mode instead of doing it the other way around? App devs can just add that meta tag to their web apps, and the rest of the world can code to a standard that doesn't involve MS.

I really think that'd be the best way to go, and you'd probably agree that this isn't an anti-ms rhetoric. I code HTML, too, and I really think that if IE8 can do ACTUAL standards compliance, that should be the default. I shouldn't have to put a tag on my document saying that Firefox should render the site differently than Opera, so I shouldn't have to put a tag on my document saying that IE8 needs to render it a certain way, either. Legacy is unimportant, in my opinion (just try using IE4 to browse the net), and so instead of having a tag to depart from it, the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode. Hell, using the tag like that, it might be possible to look at rendering those Frontpage sites the same way across platforms.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[kebes]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. I don't buy it (or maybe I just don't get it--if so, please explain).

IE (just like Firefox, etc.) has a "quirks" mode which renders things in a non-standards compliant way, but is designed to "more or less work" with all the pages out there that are not strictly coded. This new tag is supposed to apply to web-pages where the web author has already explicitly said he wants strict rendering, because he said so in the DOCTYPE. But instead of just fixing IE so that it renders that standards-compliant code better and better, they propose to freeze that rendering sub-engine, and force web-developers to add a new tag that basically says "yes I really meant I wanted you to render strictly!"

It seems to me that the majority of pages that rely on rendering quirks will be okay, since they will be rendered in quirks mode. But pages that were intended to be standards-compliant should be treated as such.

Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE. (If they want a custom tag for the IE7->IE8 transition, they probably will want a new one for the next transition...) The entire point of these standards was to get away from browser-specific tags and hacks. A web developer shouldn't have to think about what browsers are on the market today (or 3 years from now): he should just code to the standard.

Put otherwise: Instead of asking everyone who has written a standards-compliant page to add-in a non-standard tag to make it work in IE... wouldn't it be easier to tell everyone "hey, if you've coded a page that is ~almost~ standards-compliant, but relies in some way on IE7-specific behavior, then add in this <NotQuiteStandard> tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7."

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?" This isn't too hard to figure out if we set the wayback machine to the early 90's. When the Web was new, there were few standards for webpages (and many of the early standards were just horrible). The early browsers were trial and error attempts to get the majority of webpages to render correctly and it was a huge mess.

So when each new iteration of browser came out, MS (and netscape) had to deal with exactly the point you were making - not to break all the webpages that were already out there. We can all look back a decade or two later and say that once the standards matured they should have stuck to them and abandoned all the older pages, but thats the benefit of hindsight. The idea of standards is great, and I know it's tempting to say "drop support for non standard webpages and force them all to be rewritten!" but that's just not how the world works.

It's a shitty situation, to be sure, but that's life and it's the responsibility of web developers to deal with it, because frankly that's what they are paid for.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[moderatorrater]

In this regard at least, they're striking a balance between the needs of professional, highly qualified people and the needs of unqualified people who aren't doing upkeep or can't do upkeep. The problem with saying that everyone should be standards compliant is that there are sites incapable of being standards compliant because their writers can't.

A lot of people would argue that if they break, they break, who cares? This is going to sound lame, but the web wasn't built on the principle of exclusion, it was built on the principle that anyone who can put something on the internet, should. It was built by random people putting things together.

Standards make life easier for the professional and those with the ability to perform upkeep when the target changes, but for the amateurs standards can be a royal pain in the ass. In the case of the web, I strongly believe that the browsers should favor the amateurs over the professionals, because the professionals can conform a lot easier.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode. There's the problem... WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?

In the last 8 years I've probably done 20 websites for various NFP's, schools, and organizations I've been a member of or was hired by. The vast majority of those sites are for organizations that have little to no internal IT department. If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no one on staff with the knowledge or ability to fix it.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[AmaDaden]

I'm not sure but I think that Firefox just mimicked IE on a lot of things to force those pages to work. The fact that the pages render in well firefox shows how good of a job the firefox team did not that those pages render well for a standards compliant browser

Re:It's the most logical decision

[stubear]

"There are other ways MS could address this issue rather than continuing their embrace extend destroy strategies. There is no reason IE specific tags should be required to make a page display according to an international standard."

Please enlighten us as to these myriad possibilities hat you allude to. Keep in mind that you have to keep existing web sites from breaking.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[TheSunborn]

I think that Firefox just mimicked IE when the site don't contain a doctype.

I don't think that there are any case where firefox follow ie6/7 insted of w3c when showing pages with a valid doc type.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

What the hell are you talking about? I didn't rant at anyone for bashing MS. Hell, MS has been as the focal point of a good number of my own rants. I said look at the situation logically. If IE8 by default renders pages differently than IE6/7 with the same doctype, then anyone who has pages using IE6/7 specific rendering tricks will have to adjust their HTML. The financial investment involved would be huge. It would be foolish for MS to make such a change and then expect every organization an person to go through every live and legacy website to update code.

The logical decision from a real-world point of view is to leave legacy functionality as it is, and to require new functionality to differentiate itself from the old functionality. Whether that means a new doctype, meta-tags, IE8 specific tags, what ever. It minimizes the impact of the functional change and still allows people the full power of those changes without effecting other browsers (assuming they use meta-tags or IE8 specific tags).

My karma is fine. I say what I think. Some people agree, some people don't. But there is no '-1 Disagree' rating. If you want to talk about lack of reasoning and straw men, read the rest of the topics on this article. The vast majority are nothing by irrational flames of MS with no considerations to the technology or business that are the actual issues.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Call me old fashioned, but if your webpage relies on IE hacks to display properly and it will break when viewed in a browser/mode that actually follows standards, you deserve to have your page broken. If everyone (MS included) could just follow the goddamn standards, we wouldn't have this issue.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Secret Rabbit]

I posted this idea on one of the ie blogs, but it still holds true here. M$ has a choice:

1) Break webpages in a (possibly) significant way now and from now on be standards compliant, or

2) Break webpages in small but noticeable ways with EVERY release

Now, I'm voting for (1) because it has the best long term solution, and in that long term, has better benefits both for developers and companies. IMO, that's just a no-brainer. After all, companiees are going to have to update there stuff on every release because of (2) anyway. Why not make it matter?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[mugnyte]

Sad, really. You're advocating flavors in technology meant for interoperability simply as a behavior of an open marketplace. There's a few other places you may want to apply this:

  - Gas pumps
  - Electrical outlets
  - Railway widths
  - Traffic signals

  If the design is entirely about having a Standard then any one participant changes it by lobbying for change and accepting the results of the group decision. Without such, the standard doesn't work. You simply get mistakes, inefficiency.

  IE is broken now, and they should fix it. Period. They should fix the bugs, post a FAQ about applying the fix to web pages and let the market slowly shift over. IE8 should ship with a "view as IE7" mode, off by default. Users will slowly pressure the market. Anything less is simply pandering to the mistake and making it more complex.

  As MS abuses its market position, it erodes it.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[TheSunborn]

They would only need to change the site, if the site currently don't work in firefox and other browsers.

If the site work in firefox now, alll microsoft have to do is change internet explorer, so it don't trigger all the hacks that ie6/7 need, and your site works just fine in ie8 "super standard mode". (If "super standard mode" is a working implementation of html4+css2.1 that is)

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Sancho]

In the end, standards don't mean too much. What matters is that the majority of people can communicate. If Microsoft could get away with making the web completely proprietary, you can bet that they would. They know that they can't, so they do what they can to be close while not screwing up proprietary websites designed for their proprietary browser.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[bigstrat2003]

Please. They don't "deserve" any punishment for making pages that fit the realities of the world. The fact is, many people use IE. IE doesn't follow standards. Thus, you need to specifically support IE in your web pages unless you're ok with leaving the majority of your potential users in the dark (which no sane person would be). The developers who made pages which have "IE mode" did what they had to do, because they understood that reality was not like they wanted it to be, and they had to adjust to it. Quite bluntly, it sounds like you're the sort of person who expects the world to revolve around you, and what you think the world should be like.

Your analogy about government bail-outs is a poor one, too, considering Microsoft isn't an institution of the people, for the good of the people. The government has very different expectations and responsibilities than Microsoft, the analogy fails.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

ACID is designed to test a browser's adherence to a set standard. Exactly. And from the sounds of it, IE8 will do very well (err, at least better than IE6/7) at it. BUT you have to give it a meta tag in order for it to do so. So for ACID to test the browser fully, it has to use all of the tools the browser has available.

Saying that ACID should test IE8's non-standards compliant rendering is just retarded. We already know that IE8's non-standards compliant rendering will not render ACID correctly. ACID needs to test the standards-compliant rendering.

The only question is how do you determine which rendering engine to use by default. If you use the standards compliant engine, you risk showing the user broken sites anytime they visit a page that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. If you use the non-compliant engine, then there is no risk of breaking any existing pages (at least, not in ways that they weren't already broken). So using the non-compliant engine by default makes the most sense for the User as it will provide them with a more consistent experience. It is also the best option for web site providers as they won't have to invest the time and money into revamping legacy and live websites to remove the IE6/7 tricks.

If the only benefit to setting IE8 to use the standards compliant engine by default is that it will pass the existing ACID test, then there isn't much reason to do so.

If you disagree, that's fine. But I'll leave it up to you to work out the funding of all the projects that will need to be undertaken to correct legacy web sites.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[bigstrat2003]

I get your point, and you may have a more real-world-ready opinion than some of us, but I am not ready to concede anything to MS in this regard. That kind of stubborn attitude doesn't do anyone any good. You're welcome to try to change what the world is like. I encourage you to do so, in fact. However, in the meantime, the world is not ideal, and you have to adapt to it. This is a necessary step towards standards compliance for IE, and you're going to tell MS to shove it up their ass? You must not want standards compliance for IE that badly, I have to say.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Yar, I should have clarified. I would assume that given the introduction of a new doctype, for which there is not a legacy support issue, that the default would be the most standards-compliant option. For existing doctypes, where there is a legacy support issue, the default should remain what it already is.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Or option 3:

Require a non-compliant tag to force compliance mode in existing doctypes.
For all future doctypes, maintain compliance.

There ya go, not a single broken website, and all it takes is using a non-compliant tag until the next standard is released. Sounds like a great compromise to me.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[AmaDaden]

WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?

In the last 8 years I've probably done 20 websites for various NFP's, schools, and organizations I've been a member of or was hired by.

You just answered your own question. It should be VERY trivial to add the one line of MS-HTML to these sites for you. They don't feel like paying someone to do it? Then they get a broken web site. It's sounds like I'm being an ass but in the long run it will be far less work for everyone. The switch over to standard HTML has to happen at some point, delaying it with stupid tricks is not going to make it any easier. If MS keeps up this kind of crap anyone coding to IE will just have a huge mess on their hands. They are just making it harder for web developers from here on out and by doing that they are shooting them self in the foot.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?"

Microsoft didn't know how to. They don't feel the need. Maybe when big companies like Boeing, GM, Ford, General Electric and others realize the lock-in bind they are in they will standardize on open browsers like Firefox. Then, and only then will M$ blink.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Runefox]

As has been said, it's trivial to put a line of code at the top of a document (especially if the header is a PHP include), and if standards push forward, this will only be necessary for older websites and web apps, which would then cease to be created further. Who codes for Netscape's version of HTML 3 these days?

Not only that, but things like Quickbooks, for example, which make use of the MS HTML rendering engine, could simply roll out a patch to automatically fix their HTML code (IE7 caused major issues with the way it rendered QB stuff, from what I've been told), which means no IT/web staff are needed. Those companies who would actually require that would either already have such a department/person, or have one who they can hire to do maybe an hour's work for them to fix it up. And again, if the header's just a PHP include (or in a CMS, a settings file of some sort), it's one change that needs to be made, site-wide.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Interestingly enough, I drive a diesel, It has a large mouth filler neck open to allow for the diesel specific pump nossles. But at my local gas station, on the diesel pump, they have both the small (standard gas engine filler neck) and the large (standard diesel engine filler neck) nossles.

You know why? Because it's easier to get the smaller nossle into most light duty vehicle filler necks. It's all about the user experience.

Yes, IE is broken, yes, it should be fixed, but it has to be fixed the right way. You have to look at the financial implications of the situation. Sure, a lot of people here are saying 'screw it, fix it and let the shit hit the fan' and that's great, until ecommerce sites have rendering issues interfering with people's purchases, interactive systems become difficult to use because of rendering differences, etc...

There is a whole lot of money to lose out there. Consumers don't care what standard you are using, they don't care about doc types and meta tags. They care about getting to the website they want to get to and doing what ever it is that they can do there. And if they just downloaded MS's latest greatest browser, and pages are breaking all over, there will be two issues:

1) Lots of negative feedback from users to MS about how IE8 is "broken", which leads to a slower penetration of IE8 and a longer time frame of IE6/7 hack support.
2) Fiscal ramifications for any organization that has a website that was designed with IE6/7 limitations in mind. Someone is going to have to go through those pages and update the HTML.

Users will not "slowly pressure the market". Users will scream and yell, abandon providers, and change software.

By using a tag with the current doctypes to use the compliance rendering engine you ensure that:
1) All existing web pages continue to render just as the always have.
2) Anyone doing new development has a standards compliant rendering engine available.

I don't understand what people have against that.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[SnprBoB86]

Put otherwise: Instead of asking everyone who has written a standards-compliant page to add-in a non-standard tag to make it work in IE... wouldn't it be easier to tell everyone "hey, if you've coded a page that is ~almost~ standards-compliant, but relies in some way on IE7-specific behavior, then add in this tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7." It would be easier to ask, but it would be unrealistic to expect that to work. The middle-tier standards mode is triggered by a docttype which is inserted by many tools such as Dreamweaver which generate non-standard pages! You are asking a world full of completely un-knowledgeable people to be able to add the 'NotQuiteStandard' tag. As far as the average web developer is concerned, if it looks OK in Dreamweaver or Visual Studio, or whatever, it's fine: ship it. People who are struggling with CSS to make everything look just right in every browser, well they are going to be able to insert a "really do it right!" tag because they are the knowledgeable ones.

That said, I think this strategy is weak. If I were in charge, I'd make IE6/7 modes available in IE8 only by use of a URL pattern similar to how the IE-Tab extension works in FireFox. That would cure the problem for intranet applications because the network administrators could easily configure this by group policy.

Additionally, I would make a phishing-detector-style system which reports render-engines preferences to some central server so that the average Joe home user doesn't need to muck with these settings -- they would just get them automatically.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas we are in the minority. There are far fewer standards-compliant HTML documents out there that would need to add just one meta tag or HTTP header than there are horrifically broken pages that claim to be standard. Still, I probably won't use the meta tag, myself.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[ls -la]

Please. They don't "deserve" any punishment for making pages that fit the realities of the world. If they use the strict doctype, the page should be rendered strictly. If their page isn't strictly compliant, they should never have used the strict doctype in the first place.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, broken pages should require tags to inform the browser that they do not conform to standards, and thus require special attention - not the other way around. Sure, but the point is to make the browser backwards compatible with existing pages so they don't have to be changed. TBH I don't see this as a problem and neither that IE8 only render ACID2 in "super" standards compliance mode. The fact that IE8 won't break as many pages as IE7 did it will make it a lot easier to convince people to use it, especially corporate users, plus it will make web designers job a lot easier with less incompatibilities between different browser vendors...

This has been said too many times to count and I think this really is a non-issue. Stop whining!

Re:It's the most logical decision

[acvh]

"hey don't "deserve" any punishment for making pages that fit the realities of the world."

not overt, explicit punishment, no. but they took the risk of developing to a broken platform, and that risk has a price.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

As has been said, it's trivial to put a line of code at the top of a document (especially if the header is a PHP include), and if standards push forward, this will only be necessary for older websites and web apps, which would then cease to be created further. Again, WHO would do this? One of the organizations I worked on a website for was a not for profit nature conservancy. They have 3 employees who have only a minimal level of IT knowledge. Yes, it would be trivial for anyone from /. to make the change, but they wouldn't even likely know about the issue (if there were one) for some time, and then they would have to have a consultant come out to take a look and see what the problem was, and then again to actually do the work. You could be talking about a $1,000-10,000 bill by the time the website is made fully standards compliant.

It makes significantly MORE sense to require the tag for compliance mode in NEW DEVELOPMENT. Since it's new development, there are already developers working on it. Since there are already (hopefully) skilled and knowledgeable developers on the project, the change becomes trivial and the requirement of adding 1 extra tag to every page would amount to maybe a few minutes over the length of the project.

Once the next standard is released, the whole issue become moot as (hopefully) MS continues to adhere to the standard.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[DAtkins]

"IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style."

As a programmer who missed out on the lucrative Y2K bug, I for one welcome the millions of people who might have broken pages and need 1 new line of code. I'm pretty sure I could handle it :-)

Seriously guys, if you're getting paid for it, it's awesome. If you aren't getting paid for it, it's still not a big deal. We're talking about 3 lines of PERL to change over an entire site...

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Tom]

Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE. And maybe that's exactly what this is all about.

Let's see, most people are motivated by either money or power. Everyone near the top of MS has more than enough money. So we can safely assume their game is for power. Making everyone do something totally pointless just because you can sounds just about right as a test and/or demonstration of power.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Bogtha]

This new tag is supposed to apply to web-pages where the web author has already explicitly said he wants strict rendering, because he said so in the DOCTYPE.

No, that's not at all the case.

Way back when the web was first taking off in a big way, browser vendors were adding lots of proprietary element types and attributes. Most of them weren't very well thought out, but there was a pressing need to get them into a specification to ensure interoperability. The result was HTML 3.2, with a lot of stuff that really shouldn't be in there.

The next version of HTML took all these out again because better ways (e.g. CSS) had been developed to handle their functionality. Of course, there needed to be an upgrade path from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4, so the W3C published HTML 4 in two major forms — a backwards-compatible document type, called "Transitional", and a modern document type, called "Strict".

That's what the "strict" refers to in the doctype. It's got nothing to do with rendering modes.

Now, when Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was being developed, Microsoft realised that they couldn't improve its conformance to the specifications without breaking backwards compatibility. They came up with a hack that guessed whether to be backwards-compatible or specifications-compatible by looking at the doctype to see if it was there, if it was out of date, etc.

This "doctype switching" is a proprietary, non-standard hack, that happened to catch on amongst browsers. The fact that a document refers to the strict doctype does not imply that the developer is choosing a particular rendering mode, it just means that they are using a modern document type.

But instead of just fixing IE so that it renders that standards-compliant code better and better

No, this is exactly what they are doing, and this is the very reason why such a switch is necessary.

Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE.

No, this isn't the case. Any developer who wants Internet Explorer to use its most recent rendering engine at all times can select "edge" and be done with it.

The entire point of these standards was to get away from browser-specific tags and hacks.

Yes, and this is an attempt to do just that. Doctype switching is a proprietary hack. <meta> is the standard HTML method of including metadata. Furthermore, providing a switch like this allows them to slowly deprecate the older rendering engines over time.

Put otherwise: Instead of asking everyone who has written a standards-compliant page to add-in a non-standard tag to make it work in IE... wouldn't it be easier to tell everyone "hey, if you've coded a page that is ~almost~ standards-compliant, but relies in some way on IE7-specific behavior, then add in this <NotQuiteStandard> tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7."

No, this would cause mass regressions because there are a hell of a lot of unmaintained websites out there.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Chosen Reject]

Not the OP here, but...

Please enlighten us as to these myriad possibilities hat you allude to. Keep in mind that you have to keep existing web sites from breaking.

Why? Why do existing pages not have to break. The standard was published. It was there in the open for all people to see. Anybody could look at it and use it and wouldn't have to pay a dime to do so. It's not difficult to follow the standard. I don't write html for a living, but whenever I do write a web page, I write according to the standards. If it doesn't work in IE, then it doesn't work in IE. If it doesn't work in Firefox, then it doesn't work in Firefox. If it doesn't work in Opera, then it doesn't work in Opera. And if it doesn't work in any browser, then it doesn't work in any browser. I might consider not using whatever it is that doesn't work, and doing something else instead, but I refuse to write according to some browser's whims. IOW, I will write according to standards. If every web developer did that, browser makers would be forced to make their browser's standards compliant. Instead, we have everyone writing willy-nilly as if there was no standard at all.

Go with the standard. Period. Full stop. If that breaks millions of websites then millions of websites were written by idiots. If you stop tolerating non-standards compliance (from all browser makers) then we would have standards compliance already. Instead we just write according to silly quirks and deal with it and now we're in a quandry.

I view this somewhat like y2k. A bunch of idiots didn't use proper methods and then we had to pay a bunch of people to change it. A lot of apps would have broken (not nearly as much as the hype suggested, but a lot nonetheless) and we had to pay for people to fix the mistakes from previous. It's going to have to happen eventually, so you might as well do it now. Otherwise, there's going to be a new meta-tag for IE9 that says "No seriously now we're really standards compliant," when they are only 90% there, then one for IE10 "We mean it, this time it works," when they are only 91% there, and so on and forever.

Get over it, the html and css, etc. you wrote was shoddy and broken. It does not matter one whit that you did it so the browser with the largest market share would render it correctly. You could look up the standard, you could tell MS that they weren't following it and that their browser would not be supported. If everyone had done that, IE6 would be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. Now they're upset about the cum stains on the sheets.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[mugnyte]

  I think if there's a flag in IE to work as 7, the "fix" is a communication issue, not a technical one. Nobody needs to change existing pages.

  Millions of users on millions of sites aren't going to stop working - the user will simply need to switch the flag. Let's say it's ON by default (IE8 renders as 7).

  Frankly, it's not different than the amount of hands-on attention they should already be giving their browsing - with filters, security levels, plugins, etc.

  What people have against it is that you dont modify a standard by decreeing a new tag - especially to force "strict standards". It's highly ironic and dilbertesqe.

  The estimate stands: market share erodes and slowly MS bends to meet the general market standard.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Chosen Reject]

The financial investment involved would be huge. It would be foolish for MS to make such a change and then expect every organization an person to go through every live and legacy website to update code.

Yes, and Y2K was free.

Oh wait, no it wasn't. Maybe we should have just changed to a revolving year system where every 100 years we go back to 00. That way we wouldn't have had to deal with that whole fiasco.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[msuarezalvarez]

Saying that ACID should test IE8's non-standards compliant rendering is just retarded. We already know that IE8's non-standards compliant rendering will not render ACID correctly. ACID needs to test the standards-compliant rendering.

You are missing the important fact that part of complying with the standard is following the standard.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Chosen Reject]

You aren't thinking about business opportunities then.

You are a COBOL programmer. The year is 1999. What do you do?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Correct, if your site is fine in FF now, it should render OK in the IE8 standards compliant engine as well.

The problem is, that would still require a review of every existing legacy site to see if it does in fact render correctly in FF and IE8, and if it doesn't to alter the HTML to either use a different doctype/mode or to update the HTML to be standards compliant. That represents a huge investment.

The alternative, to continue using the non-standards compliant engine by default, and to use an IE8 specific tag to force non-default behavior with existing doctypes guaranties that existing pages will render the same as they had before, but allows developers to go forward with a fully standards compliant rendering.

Going forward, as new standards are released and doctypes set, we can hope that MS will remain standards compliant and we won't have to use a non-compliant tag like this to get standard compliant behavior by default. But for the existing realm of doctypes, it makes more sense to not risk the possibility of anything breaking and to give developers a flag to force compliance.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[andrew_starks]

This doesn't have as much to do about IE 8 and Microsoft as it does about the nature of the evolution of ALL web browsers and the web pages that were made before their release. Even without IE 8, this tag is needed. Look, Firefox 1 and 2 don't render like each other and neither do different versions of Safari. Very few browsers in the wild today render CSS perfectly and without a mechanism like this tag, web developers are forced into a reactive mode as things change.

For those of you that develop web sites now, what do you do when ANY new browser is released? You react. What does the user experience in the early days of the browser's release? Who's fault is it? It's an unorganized, uncontrollable mess and the only good fix that I can see is what is being proposed here.

With this tag, it puts the burden on the browser maker to keep older rendering styles in play, which means stability for existing web pages no matter what happens with the next browser or CSS, for that matter. As it is, browser publishers (FF, Safari, Opera included) have to always keep their previous bugs and behaviors in mind when they make a new version. With the tag, they focus on compliance. Awesome.

If it wasn't Microsoft part of the story, half of the negative comments in this thread wouldn't be posted. It's a fantastic addition to the tools available to web designers, completely changes the work load required when a new browser is released and I welcome it with open arms. It's hell out here, as it is.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

the user will simply need to switch the flag. And when I tell Aunt Edna she needs to switch a flag to make the fan site for her favorite soap opera to render correctly, she's going to go to her porch, take down the stars and stripes, and put up a maple leaf. All the while, wondering what the heck the Canadian flag has to do with her computer.

Point being, this isn't the kind of stuff you pester a user with. If IE8 hits a webpage with a doctype released prior to it's release, it should default to IE7 rendering. If it encounters the IE8 specific tag, or a doctype that was released after IE8, it should use the IE8 Standards Compliant rendering engine.

Frankly, it's not different than the amount of hands-on attention they should already be giving their browsing - with filters, security levels, plugins, etc. Frankly, it's not different than the amount of hands-on attention they should already be giving their car.

What is the Octane rating of the fuel in your car? What is the weight of the oil? What is the winter weight of the oil? What is the air pressure in each of your tires? What is the oil level? How many months has it been since your last oil change? How many miles since your last oil change? How many months since your coolant has been flushed? How many miles/months since your tranny fluid has be flushed? Miles on your diff fluid?

How many of those can you rattle off? How many of those can your friends rattle off? How many of those can your Grandparent rattle off?

What people have against it is that you dont modify a standard by decreeing a new tag - especially to force "strict standards". It's highly ironic and dilbertesqe. And the funny thing about Dilbert, is that quite often it is true. And sometimes, it's true for a very good reason.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Phillup]

The developers who made pages which have "IE mode" did what they had to do, because they understood that reality was not like they wanted it to be, and they had to adjust to it. Then they should have absolutely no problem having to go back to fix it.

The point is, they are the ones that decided to specifically support IE with their hacks. There is no reason now to punish people that didn't and don't want to do that.

If MS wants to create hacks for their browsers, then those hacks should be targeted at the people that care about their browser... not the rest of the web.

Your analogy about government bail-outs is a poor one, too, considering Microsoft isn't an institution of the people, for the good of the people. The analogy is valid. The people making the decision that lead to the mess should be the ones bearing the price to fix the mess.

Not everyone else.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[sheldon]

I didn't quite understand this at first, and I'm still not certain how it will benefit people designing pages to work with the new IE8 standards when we have users with older browsers. But I do agree that moving forward, it makes tremendous sense.

It also benefits every other browser out there, so this isn't an IE only thing.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

You pick your battles. Take the avenue of least resistance.

Altering our system of time measurement would be great and all, but the force required to do so would be incomprehensible. So we fix the technical issue.

In this situation:

Option A)
Altering IE8 to render in the IE7 way by default takes no investment on our part.

Altering IE8 to accept a non-standard tag to force standards compliant mode on pre-existing doctypes takes a minimal effort.

-or-

Option B)
Reviewing and possibly altering every existing web page with a strict doc type would require a significant investment in both IT resources and cash. An investment that many organizations are unable to make.

Gee, I wonder why MS would want to go with Option A. No risk, tiny investment requirements by developers, vs huge risk and significant investment... Wow! How would they ever come to that conclusion.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[AeroIllini]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. Sounds great to me. Welcome to the Standardized Web (tm), we hope you enjoy your stay. On the plus side, all the development needed to change over to standards will be fast and easy, because the standards themselves are well defined and fully published. No more of this ridiculous trial-and-error, click'n'pray style of development. Consistency is a good thing.

Alternatively, they can create a new doctype specifically for the new "more better" rendering. This way, the millions of existing pages that are already designed to render in the exiting style will continue to do so, and anyone looking to use a closer to the standards rendering has the option to. And destroy any incentive for anyone to write compliant pages, now or ever. "Why would we go through all the trouble to validate our code, when it works correctly in all the new versions of IE by default?"

Microsoft's aim is not to standardize. That's only their PR talking point. They still have every intention of locking the majority of the web into playing nice with IE, to keep Windows on most machines. That's not anti-MS rhetoric, it's their standard operating procedure.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

And for those of us who have to justify to our bosses what the budget should be spent on. Or when we have to make a decision between new hardware or reviewing all of our web systems. Or when I have to tell my old clients that they're going to have to take money out of a scholarship program or a nature conservancy project to pay a consultant to come in an audit their website...

Yeah, and people call ME an asshole.

MS f'd up in the first place. And now they're trying to make it right in a way that takes the least amount of risk and work. To bad they screwed it up to start with, but at least they are being logical in their attempt to finally fix it.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Chosen Reject]

I don't fault MS for wanting to go with Option A. I fault people for being OK with it. I fault people for being OK with ignoring standards this long. If everyone had written their sites according to standards the first time, and then came to the browser makers (all of them as none are perfect AFAIK) and told them which part of the standard their browser was borked on, then all of the browsers would already be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. That's the price you pay though. If you can't afford to fix the mistakes, then make sure you get it right the first time. That goes for both the developers of the web sites that are broken, and the developers of the browsers that are broken.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Runefox]

I don't think that's a good idea, because it'll create a hell of a lot more work in the long run, even if it is one line. It's one line that shouldn't have to be there, and one line more that's going to take up space in the document (from a bandwidth point of view, though compression would help this). It would be a lot less work to retroactively fix the websites and applications that are currently IE-only (websites being a minority in this case (no self-respecting organization these days has an IE-only website); Apps would likely have someone maintaining them and thus capable of making the change trivially, profit or non) than to force all web developers to add this tag in the future from now til forever, just because IE6 didn't implement the DOCTYPE properly and is now broken.

It's almost like saying you'd need to add a meta tag to enable alpha transparent PNG's in IE8 because IE6's default behaviour was to blend it with whatever you set the Window colour to in the Display Properties dialogue. You shouldn't have to code things differently on a new browser to fix the bugs in the rendering of an old one. The old renderer should be brought out on a case-by-case basis, not by default. As for non-profit organizations, if things like the Candlelighters Childhood Cancer Foundation can afford to get call centres to solicit donations over telephone, and if they can afford to build a website, they can afford to pay someone to spend an hour or two fixing their website/web apps for them.

All of this, of course, is also assuming that by the time IE8 is released, people will still be using IE6-based web apps in large numbers (unlikely, since IE7 has major departures from IE6's rendering scheme (which actually make it slightly better for standards, paving the way for the next step) and is currently being forced as an update, as per an article here yesterday), and will be willing to upgrade to the latest and greatest IE8 - And if they're not, it still assumes that by the time they do, they'll still be using those ancient apps). While chances are that there will be many organizations that will stick to older software (no newer equivalent, cost, etc), many more still would likely be using something else by then.

So again, who cares about IE6? It was the de-facto standard for several years, and now it's an old, dead horse that needs to be buried before it stinks up the web more than it already has. By the time IE8 is released, IE6 will be on the same page as IE4 is today. And how many people use IE4 now?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[denis-The-menace]

RE: then add in this tag, and IE8 will render it like IE7."/i?

But that would punish all the idiots that drank the MS-koolaid.
MS want to punish those that didn't!

Re:It's the most logical decision

[strings42]

On a purely philosophical point... what is the use of having an international standard if the said standard changes based on the whims of a single corporation?

While I appreciate and support the goals of the Web Standards Project, I think "International Standard" is misrepresenting Acid2. "International Standard" implies the buyin of some recognized standards body, doesn't it? Not trying to be argumentative nor split hairs, just trying to point out that the acceptance of a given metric as a standard, even by a great number of people, does not make it a recognized, formal standard.

Perhaps a better way to say that would be, standards are only as standard as we are willing (or legally obligated) to make them. If you like Acid2 and think browsers should render it correctly as a fundamental capability, then don't user browsers that don't properly render Acid2. Don't have a choice for your work (I don't)? That's a business decision. Don't control that decision at your place of work (I don't)? Work somewhere else.

It all depends on how dedicated *you* are to enforcing Acid2 as standard.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[CrazedWalrus]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style.

So what? Seriously. If it's important, it'll get fixed in a hurry. If it's not important, who cares?

Besides, I hear this sort of talk all the time. This Y2K-esque "end of the world if we make one mistake" mentality is extremely prevalent in IT departments, where people are trying to predict "worst case scenarios". Usually they wind up WAAAAAY overestimating the impact, and only really succeed in dog-locking themselves into a piss-poor environment where they're afraid to change anything. Sometimes you have to take a risk if you're ever going to move ahead. "What if" and "I bet it'll break..." only sink your tires deeper into the mud of perceived helplessness.

Any anger at MS for "breaking the web" (allowing for a bit of self-aggrandizement) will be short lived, AS LONG AS THEY DO IT RIGHT THIS TIME, and don't create another steaming pile in the process. Using this sort of tagging is a graceless solution brought about by an overinflated fear of consequences that simply won't matter. I don't care if it is "standard HTML", it's being used in a way that will make sites even more complicated to maintain.

If MS truly wants to avoid "breaking the web" (I can't even type it with a straight face), they'll release lots previews leading up to the official release. I'm talking "nightly build" style. That way when sites do break, they can just say they gave ample opportunity and can do no more. Any company with a web department worth its salt will be testing these builds at least once every month to make sure nothing crazy happens that they'll need to address.

Come on, MS, I know it hurts, but take a cue from Open Source. Release early and often, and this crap won't happen.

(PS -- when I say "self aggrandizement", I'm referring to this notion that Microsoft feels they bear the weight of the web on their shoulders, when, in reality, it's in all companies' best interest to ensure that testing and modifications are done BEFORE MS pushes the IE8 update pack. MS doesn't need to feel they're solely responsible, as long as they allow enough lead time for others to make required changes.)

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Bogtha]

It should be VERY trivial to add the one line of MS-HTML to these sites for you.

So does he do this work for the 20 organisations for free, or do they pay him? Do they have to find out when people start telling them their websites don't work, or should he spend time testing every site he's ever designed? What if he's moved on and isn't available to hire any more?

In essence, what you are saying is that Microsoft should break sites for a lot of organisations that don't have much money, and when they find out, they'll have to hire a consultant to figure out what's wrong and fix it. This is not a trivial thing to many people, "oh it's jut a line of code" doesn't cut it when you are breaking existing code all over the world.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Chester K]

Microsoft's plan isn't sustainable or elegant: they basically want the entire web-community to add another tag each time MS releases a new version of IE. (If they want a custom tag for the IE7->IE8 transition, they probably will want a new one for the next transition...)

The custom tag was designed with both future versioning and multiple browsers in mind. When IE 9 comes out, you don't need a new tag, you just need to change the "8" to a "9" in the existing tag to enable IE 9 to enable all the behaviorial updates that would have broken pages designed with IE 8 in mind.

The idea is that pages designed for IE 8 will continue to work unaltered in future versions of IE because they explicitly state they want IE 8's behavior. The entire web-community doesn't need to go back to all their old pages each time a new version of IE is released -- they only need to bump the version number in the meta tag up when they create or update a page and that page now needs access to the newer behavior.

There's also a version you can specify named "edge" which basically tells IE that it should always use the newest rendering behavior available. This is where the problem is.

The tag itself is not a bad thing. It makes sense to embed an implementation version into the data; especially in cases where content may be burned to disc and cannot be easily updated when technology moves forward to allow newer browsers to assume older layout to ensure it remains unchanged and unbroken in appearance. DOCTYPE itself does exactly the same function, but it does it at the published standard level. In a pragmatic world where no browser supports 100% of the published standards, having a separate version number for the implementation level is just good policy.

But going back to why IE took a good idea and made it a bad thing (and why they're sorta helpless about it): in the absence of the new meta tag, IE 8 behaves as if "IE=7" is specified. In order to opt into full standard support, you need to explicitly state "IE=edge". This is backwards to how it should be. "edge" should be the default unless a lower version is explicitly specified, because in the absence of the meta tag, the DOCTYPE has already said you expect the most fully standards-compliant rendering the browser can give you. The meta tag should be acting as a vehicle to further limit rendering, not as a requirement to fully open it up.

But Microsoft's in a difficult situation here. There are millions of pages already out there with a correct DOCTYPE, but no meta tag -- under the more correct way of using a meta tag, they'd default into the newest layout engine possible, which would cause the widespread breakage that is the reason why this meta tag was dreamed up in the first place. Microsoft is partially to blame for this because their older versions of IE had broken standards support; but blame also rests on the thousands of web designers who've relied on equally standards-breaking hacks to get the layout they wanted out of IE in the past.

Now, what would I do if I were Microsoft? This: Continue down the meta tag path, but change the default for pages served up in a standards-compliant way to "edge" instead of "7". Who cares if no other browser supports it that way -- it changes the whole meta tag idea into a value-add feature, instead of a compatibility hack. Yes, it will be painful dealing with the gnashing of teeth that will accompany the resulting page breakage, but we already dealt with that with IE 7. The worst is already over because IE 7's already out there breaking pages, and web designers are already on their toes that IE is a moving target again so the next rev won't be as bad because they've hopefully learned their lesson that you shouldn't work around browser limitations with ugly hacks because it'll bite you in the butt in the end.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe instead of just hacking something together you should have made them standards complient web pages?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[AmaDaden]

Those sites broke every other time a new version of IE came out, and those times there was no magic one line fix. Hell every time a new version of Windows came out they were "breaking existing code all over the world." I'm sorry but it's no excuse. If I code a web site correctly I expect it to work correctly. I should not need a hack because MS thinks it's the golden boy.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[bigstrat2003]

There is no reason now to punish people that didn't and don't want to do that First, adding one damn tag is no punishment. The effort is so small that we can count it as zero. Second, it's also an investment into the future, because if IE gets to the point where it supports standards really well, and web sites also support IE, Microsoft can finally drop the legacy stuff they have to deal with now, and make every web developer's life easier. If I were a web developer, I'd be jumping for joy at this, not bitching that it's a punishment.

The analogy is valid. The people making the decision that lead to the mess should be the ones bearing the price to fix the mess. The analogy is horribly invalid. The government, if they bail some lenders out, pays just as much cost as the lenders would have. It costs society the same. However, in this case, the cost to society is ~0, because all that it requires is to add one freaking tag to the template of every web site which is built from now on.

If the government could bail out a major lender for $.01, I'd be clamoring for the government to do so, because that $.01 cost on society would produce a huge benefit. Not to mention, the government STILL isn't analagous in any way to web developers or Microsoft.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[grcumb]

the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode. There's the problem... WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?

The webmaster will, by adding a single default HTTP header to the web server hosting those crappy, non-compliant sites.

The HTML being suggested is actually a substitute for an actual HTTP header: <META HTTP-EQUIV='foo' ... >. So actually adding the header itself to the server, either once for all your sites, or once for each non-compliant site, is far less work than updating the HTML.

One line change. Works for every site hosted. Still too hard for you?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[jam244]

the web author has already explicitly said he wants strict rendering, because he said so in the DOCTYPE.

That's not a realistic assumption. It'd sure be nice, but it's complete fantasy to assume that every page with a strict DOCTYPE was written by a benevolent developer who is willing to fix every page he ever wrote after every release of IE.

Microsoft's solution is messy, but breaking millions of pages for the sake of standards is just a purist's dream.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

But instead of just fixing IE so that it renders that standards-compliant code better and better, they propose to freeze that rendering sub-engine, and force web-developers to add a new tag that basically says "yes I really meant I wanted you to render strictly!"

Don't I know this? Ah yes, it's UAC for webpages! ;)

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

because if IE gets to the point where it supports standards really well, and web sites also support IE, Microsoft can finally drop the legacy stuff they have to deal with now

Too bad, that will never happen. Now that there is a foolproof method which guarantees compatibility with new MS browsers, it will be impossible to justify the expense of developing one version for IE6/7 and one version for modern browsers. If there was ever a reason to write IE6/7-only websites, this header is it. Microsoft might as well never update their browser again.

It's a really rotten move: This way Microsoft ensures that all those intranet sites remain firmly MS-only, and at the same time IE will be able to participate in the public web, because (obviously) web developers will cater to the "market leader".

Re:It's the most logical decision

[paving-slab]

Personally I think the best solution would be to have a button on the toolbar that says IE7. If the page your viewing doesn't render correctly click on the IE7 button - no need for any non-standard tags.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

One line change. Works for every site hosted. Still too hard for you? For the love of all things, none of this is hard for ME. There are thousands of organizations in the world that have websites that don't have web admins. It's not a matter of "hard" for them. They won't even know that a problem exists until one of the employees goes to the site from a home computer. And even when they do find out there is an issue, they don't have the knowledge to understand the cause. Sure, they can hire a consultant for $100+/hour to take a look, and hopefully the person is smart enough (and honest!) to find and correct the issue in very short order.

The issue is of all of the legacy websites out there that may be effected by this change. If any of those sites are effected in a way that effects their visitors experience, it is bad for users. If the changes in the user's experience changes their service requests from the web site's owner, it is bad for the organization. If it causes a financial hardship to the organization, what is to keep that company from suing MS? Sure, the lawsuit might not go far, but it would take resources to fight or pay to go away.

By forcing IE7 behavior by default and standards compliant behavior with a flag, they completely eliminate this risk.

The User has the same experience they always have.

The Organizations don't have to invest in their website.

Microsoft doesn't get yet another black eye for releasing a browser that "breaks" websites.

Developers looking for a more standards compliant rendering in existing doctypes can add a tag and pass ACID2.

No risk. No significant investments going forward. No investment at all for legacy apps.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

Why not add a rendering mode flag to the standard? Rendering engines, browsers, and standards don't always ship at the same time. Having a rendering mode flag in the standard would allow people to develop HTML pages against a set standard with a set rendering mode, and know that no matter how much browsers change over time, their page will always render the same. /shrug

just a thought.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

I don't think that's a good idea, because it'll create a hell of a lot more work in the long run, even if it is one line.

Hmmm, adding one line HTTP header to a server for all new development web sites, or testing every single legacy web site to see if there is a rendering issue... hmm, which sounds like it would be more work... hmmm.... one line, one time, or loading every single page of every single site... hmmm... toughie there.

It's one line that shouldn't have to be there, and one line more that's going to take up space in the document (from a bandwidth point of view, though compression would help this). Woh, I would call that a straw man, but at ~40B, I don't think I could even call it a toothpick.

It would be a lot less work to retroactively fix the websites and applications that are currently IE-only (websites being a minority in this case (no self-respecting organization these days has an IE-only website); This doesn't apply to IE only websites specifically. This applies to any website that has a strict doctype and renders differently between IE7 and IE8. Also, how many websites are there in the world? Billions? Trillions? How many websites are currently under active development? Millions? How on earth could it be "a lot less work" to fix all of the currently live sites as opposed to fixing those that are in active development?

Apps would likely have someone maintaining them and thus capable of making the change trivially, profit or non) Yes, for companies that don't have an IT department, I can see how getting a site wide update done could be considered "trivial". no, wait... I can't. Sorry, my bust.

than to force all web developers to add this tag in the future from now til forever, just because IE6 didn't implement the DOCTYPE properly and is now broken. Ideally, IE8 would not require the tag for doctypes that are released after IE8 is released. At that point you force people to stick to the standards. I'm not sure what MS's plan at that point is, but I sure hope that after IE8 is released, any new doctypes that are released will automatically render in the (more) standards compliant mode.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[NereusRen]

No, this isn't the case. Any developer who wants Internet Explorer to use its most recent rendering engine at all times can select "edge" and be done with it. Am I the only one who doesn't find this reassuring in the least?

Setting -- 2014 AD. Microsoft's IE10 includes a dramatically improved rendering engine with better compliance to standards. This causes it to render pages significantly differently from IE8 and IE9.

Microsoft: "To take advantage of our new rendering engine, please add the following tag to each page: [...]"

Us: "What about the 'edge' attribute? Shouldn't you force everyone who specified that to follow standards by rendering their pages with the new engine?"

Microsoft: "Too many pages are using that to mean 'render like IE8/9,' and using browser-specific hacks for those engines. It would break the web if we changed the rendering of those pages. Don't worry, we've added the attribute 'modern' that will always mean 'use the latest rendering engine,' so you'll never have this problem again."

Us: [facepalm]

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Tacvek]

Correct, if your site is fine in FF now, it should render OK in the IE8 standards compliant engine as well.

The problem is, that would still require a review of every existing legacy site to see if it does in fact render correctly in FF and IE8, and if it doesn't to alter the HTML to either use a different doctype/mode or to update the HTML to be standards compliant. That represents a huge investment.

The alternative, to continue using the non-standards compliant engine by default, and to use an IE8 specific tag to force non-default behavior with existing doctypes guaranties that existing pages will render the same as they had before, but allows developers to go forward with a fully standards compliant rendering.

Going forward, as new standards are released and doctypes set, we can hope that MS will remain standards compliant and we won't have to use a non-compliant tag like this to get standard compliant behavior by default. But for the existing realm of doctypes, it makes more sense to not risk the possibility of anything breaking and to give developers a flag to force compliance.

-Rick

The correct thing for Microsoft to do is to just discontinue IE entirely. All new versions of Windows should ship with either Firefox or Opera. Why? Well virtually all of the web seems to work correctly for those browsers. As long as those browsers continue to support the latest standards correctly, and not care that a few sites depending on bugs break occasionally all will be well. I mean sure all those intranet sites would need to be fixed to be standards compliant, but this would pretty much be the last time. Eventually it will be possible for sites to drop IE support entirely. Then they only really need to code to standards, and in the rare case that one of the common browsers don't follow the standards, well that is not much of a problem. Wither the web developer can leave the site broken, and be done with it (the browsers will fix things over time), or just not use the broken feature, or if a different fully standards compliant method does not break any browsers, just use that instead.

I mean since I use Firefox, as long as Firefox follows the standards quite well (as it generally does), and displays only semi-complaint pages reasonably (as it generally does) then all is well.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Phillup]

However, in this case, the cost to society is ~0, because all that it requires is to add one freaking tag to the template of every web site which is built from now on. I think it is interesting that you insist that the cost is minimal while also insisting that those that supported IE in the past should not be the one's to bear said cost.

I'm pretty sure the number of pages created in the past will be much smaller than the number of pages created in the future. So, it seems to me that the "cost" should be paid by those people that created the non-compliant web pages. Let them add a meta tag to tell IE8 to work in IE7 "standards" mode.

IE8 should work in "real standards compliant" mode by default... without needing yet another hack to make it so.

If I were a web developer, I'd be jumping for joy at this, not bitching that it's a punishment. Ah... I'm starting to see what the problem is here.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[jrumney]

Well, if standards compliance is going to break web apps, then why not just implement the new tag as a compatibility mode flag to activate the IE6/7 quirks mode instead of doing it the other way around? App devs can just add that meta tag to their web apps, and the rest of the world can code to a standard that doesn't involve MS.

Yes, it really stinks that MS are trying to make the default behaviour for the web an undocumented render_like_IE6 mode. This is much worse than the backwards compatibility crap in the OOXML spec.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[grcumb]

For the love of all things, none of this is hard for ME. There are thousands of organizations in the world that have websites that don't have web admins. It's not a matter of "hard" for them. They won't even know that a problem exists until one of the employees goes to the site from a home computer.

I will grant you that it is unfortunate that there are so many organisations and people who have been suckered into thinking that a random blodge of tag soup is good enough for them. While I despise the condition, I agree that it's really not the website owner's fault for actually believing what he's told. But my sympathy only extends so far.

I've been writing HTML since the very first days of the mosaic browser. I have objected to, and opposed, tag soup for about as long as it existed. In spite of my efforts, there was always someone there to say, 'But this way is easier!'. Every time someone bought that argument, I'd explain to them that someday the chickens would come home to roost. Some of the time, my clients listened to me, and I developed sites that worked in all browsers back then and still work in all browsers today.

The issue is of all of the legacy websites out there that may be effected by this change. If any of those sites are effected in a way that effects their visitors experience, it is bad for users. If the changes in the user's experience changes their service requests from the web site's owner, it is bad for the organization. If it causes a financial hardship to the organization, what is to keep that company from suing MS? Sure, the lawsuit might not go far, but it would take resources to fight or pay to go away.

I fail to see anything wrong with what you're describing.

Why not sue Microsoft for fscking things up? I think that's a perfectly rational response. The situation is very clearly of their making, so if anyone's got to pay, it might as well be them.

This would at least have the effect of un-fscking the situation somewhat, while the alternative being proposed by Microsoft is the opposite. Effectively, they're saying, 'We've fscked up the web due to our pseudo-random tag parsing goop that we mis-labeled HTML in order to buy some credibility. Now we're proposing to make our stuff work again by fscking things up even more.'

I say no. I say damn the torpedoes and let some sites look ugly (that is the worst-case, after all). I say as well that the cost to individual website owners will not be nearly as calamitous as you seem to think, and further that it's a worthwhile exercise in preparing the ground for a more properly organised and more easily parsed World Wide Web. You say that organisations spending money to make things right is somehow wrong. On this and the rest of your conclusions, we'll just have to respectfully disagree.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[bigstrat2003]

I think it is interesting that you insist that the cost is minimal while also insisting that those that supported IE in the past should not be the one's to bear said cost The cost is not minimal for existing web pages, that's the whole damn point. While something is under development, it's absolutely trivial to insert one line of code. It adds next-to-no effort to the process. Once something is no longer under development, however, it may not be that easy. If there's someone already there who can maintain the site, then it's easy, but it's not so easy if that isn't the case. At the very least (and I'm sure that someone would want to do it in a more complicated way than this), it involves hiring someone to make that change to the template. If the site doesn't have an easy way to change it in one spot, it involves even more work.

It is ALWAYS much cheaper to make a tiny modification to a project which is underway than to hire someone just to do that modification, because although it takes only 5 minutes of work, the guy who did it will happily charge a full hour of labor for the occasion. A developer on an active project will still charge the full hour, but those other 55 minutes will be filled with useful work, not dead space.

IE8 should work in "real standards compliant" mode by default... without needing yet another hack to make it so. No. IE8 should make backwards compatibility its top priority, at any other cost, as anyone else should. Backwards compatibility is THE #1 priority for any piece of software which is going to get used with legacy stuff.

Ah... I'm starting to see what the problem is here. Oh, yes, because NO ONE except a professional web developer could POSSIBLY have a thoughtful, well-informed opinion on the subject. What a ludicrous idea.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[jrumney]

If IE8 renders the page differently than IE6/7, even if it does so in a more standards compliant way, it is still going to make their pages appear incorrect, and they have no one on staff with the knowledge or ability to fix it.

Their pages appear incorrect for over half of webusers already, as no browser has more than 50% share if you split IE7 and IE6 (which is fair, since they already render significantly differently). Even if they managed to render consistently between IE6 and IE7, those browsers only account for 75% of the web browsing population, so if they haven't heard from the other 25% by now, then their site probably doesn't break too badly in a more standards compliant browser, and they have nothing to fear from IE8.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Your.Master]

The fact is, at no point in the past did anybody ever explicitly state, in their webpage, that they wanted it to render in the newest mode whether or not that breaks it. Doctype switching was not such a statement. This is.

Also, edge is considered "strongly discouraged".

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm genuinely curious. Can you explain how a user agent should determine rendering modes for a document? How should it validate between transitional and strict?

Technically speaking, shouldn't those two have different rendering modes, since different tags are in play?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[stubear]

"If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article."

I realize that Slashdotters take not RTFA to a whole new art form but please tell me what is 'non-standard' about a <meta> tag? This is EXACTLY what the <meta> tag was designed for. So, once again, I ask what were those myriad of possibilities that were alluded to by the OP without resorting to breaking currently developed web sites?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

I will grant you that it is unfortunate that there are so many organisations and people who have been suckered into thinking that a random blodge of tag soup is good enough for them. While I despise the condition, I agree that it's really not the website owner's fault for actually believing what he's told. But my sympathy only extends so far.

I'm not sure I follow you there. I'm not talking about MyPage-esc crap piles of disjointed MS Word generated HTML. I'm talking about professionally developed web sites that were generated using a strict doc type, the IE's dominant market share in mind.

I fail to see anything wrong with what you're describing.

Okay, so users having a bad experience, service providers losing sales, any even more lawsuits involving Microsoft are good in your opinion? Sure, suing MS is good fun an all, but the user experience and market value of e-commerce sites are slightly higher on my priority than vicasiously living out my vengence on MS through some 3rd party shopping cart vendor that lost 3 million in revenues due to a rendering difference between IE7 and IE8.

I say no. I say damn the torpedoes and let some sites look ugly (that is the worst-case, after all).

Negative, looking ugly, as you put it is a rather critical issue when it is your menu and navigation system that suddenly 'looks ugly'. Or if it is your shoping cart confirmation page that 'looks ugly'. Or a captcha that looks, err, well, uglier than usual.

Point being, the only way to be positive that your site ISN'T effected is to visit every single page in IE8 to ensure the functionality remains stable. Which, as I've said before, it not that big of a deal for companies with an IT department and/or a web savey employee. But for organizations with out such resources, detecting the issue could be delayed months, and correcting it could be a costly afair with a consulting firm.

I say as well that the cost to individual website owners will not be nearly as calamitous as you seem to think

The cheapest I was ever billed at for IT related consulting in Wisconsin was $88/hr. Back on the east coast, a solid web developer could be had for the price of $125+/hr. And if you wanted someone with experience, well, it would go up from there. And most consultants, being technological purists, like yourself, and billed hourly, would find the issue being non-standards compliant HTML being rendered differently in IE7 and IE8. Given the choice between enabling a flag in a meta tag for each page, or correcting the HTML code, most consultants would lean towards correcting the code. So for a brisk 40 hour week of work determining the problem areas, correcting them, testing them, and publishing the changes, an organization could be looking at a $3500 to $6000 bill. Heck, even if they just set the flag on each and every page, assuming they were still safe about it and not changing production pages, you could still wind up with 4+ hours of work for a $350-$600 bill. Which for a small non-IT focused organization, could be 10% of their annual IT budget.

No, I think a lot of /.er's a missing just how big of a fiscal impact this would truely represent. Which is understandable. Most /.er's are techies, we spend our days writing code, punching wires, setting up beowulf clusters, etc... Accounting is not a strong suit of the /. crowd.

Now we're proposing to make our stuff work again by fscking things up even more.'

You're looking at it from the programer's point of view. Look at it from the end user's point of view. If MS made IE8 render existing strict doctypes differently than IE7, and it makes the page "look ugly", then Microsoft has then "fscked things up". Regardless of what technologies exist behind the page, the end result is that the users of IE are unhappy. By adding a meta tag requirement to existing doctypes to get the new rendering engine, it prevents just th

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Secret Rabbit]

Actually, it isn't a compromise at all. It's M$ doing the BS again. Are you so naive that you think it'll end there? Are you so naive to think that the new better compliance mode is actually standards compliant?

Re:It's the most logical decision

[grcumb]

No, I think a lot of /.er's a missing just how big of a fiscal impact this would truely represent. Which is understandable. Most /.er's are techies, we spend our days writing code, punching wires, setting up beowulf clusters, etc... Accounting is not a strong suit of the /. crowd.

You're right in general, but wrong in this particular case. I have more reason than many to pinch pennies, working as I do in a developing nation, supporting exactly the kind of clients that you're describing.

I know the situation you're talking about quite well, having supported customers like this - as well as some very big ones - since the mid '90s. I have worked really hard to educate web developers about these issues. If you google my real name, you'll see comments from me in the newsgroups on exactly this issue dating back to those times. In 1998 I was even quoted in the New York Times, railing about the lack of standards compliance in the Netscape browser.

I'm not saying this by way of self-promotion; I just need to be clear that this is not an opinion I'm just tossing off at the first jerk of a knee. With more time, I could explain the economics of it all, emphasising the fact that saving money in the short term - no matter the budget - is often the wrong response. In my experience, wise investment always trumps short-term savings.

Living as we do in the real world, of course, we often make compromises we're not comfortable with. Sometimes this means spending less and getting less. But sometimes the compromise has to run the other way. This particular situation is clearly a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later scenario. People can pony up now and adhere to standards they should have adhered to in the first place, or they can make it clear that their sites are not compliant (which is what is being proposed here).

The suggestion that MS is making, however, relieves the guilty parties of any cost whatsoever, and puts it square on the shoulders of those who are trying to do the right thing. Worse still, they're demanding that we abuse the existing specification in order to do it, and furthermore, they would perpetuate browser-sniffing, the bane of every web developer's existence!

In a nutshell, the reason I reject your conclusions (in spite of the fact that I accept many of the arguments you put forward) is precisely because the people being asked to pay for MS' sins are those who bear the least responsibility for the problem.

Small, non-IT companies do face a burden making even the smallest changes, true. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't reap what they've sown. More to the point, others who are guiltless in this should not be forced to bear the cost. That just encourages inertia and irresponsibility.

All that would be required to insert an 'I'm Not Compliant' tag on tag-soup websites is a single HTTP header from the web server. No need to update a single page. Anyone billing more than half an hour for that is being greedy. As far as my business is concerned, I'd do it free of charge, and treat is as nothing more than a maintenance issue.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[paving-slab]

The non-standard bit is using a meta tag to provide the functionality of an already available DOCTYPE tag, thus diminishing the significance of the DOCTYPE tag and causing more problems in the future.

There is obviously not literally a myriad of possibilities, this is just hyperbole. My favoured methods are a "View as IE7" button on the toolbar or changing the browser identification string so that it can't be confused with other Explorer versions.

But I also don't see a huge problem with breaking current sites. It would be trivial to write a script to insert a meta tag in current pages that require IE6/7 to render correctly and are therefore defective pages, and will disappear in time, rather than inserting a tag in pages that are correct and creating an unnecessary burden for the foreseeable future.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

I'm not saying this by way of self-promotion; I just need to be clear that this is not an opinion I'm just tossing off at the first jerk of a knee. With more time, I could explain the economics of it all, emphasising the fact that saving money in the short term - no matter the budget - is often the wrong response. In my experience, wise investment always trumps short-term savings.

But this isn't about past money savings. Yes, MS should have followed the standards, but they didn't. So developers had 2 options, stick rigorously to the standard, and have a page that failed to render exactly as desired for 90% of you web traffic. Or design the page with IE6/7 strict mode limitations in mind so that it would render correctly for 99% of your web traffic. In that situation, it is cheapest to design solely for the standard, and damn the nuances of IE and FF, but doing so will leave you with a page that fails to render correctly in either. The 'wise investment' is to code a page in such a way that it renders correctly with the prominent technology.

Now the problem comes in when the standard remains the same, but the rendering engines change. In order to preserve legacy functionality, the proper decision would be to use the legacy engine with legacy doctypes by default, and to use the new engine with new doctypes by default.

Lets put this example in a different scenario, one that has more clearly defined boarders, but shares the exact same limitations. Let's say that MS/Intel came up with a new way of processing 32b instructions. This new way of processing could increase performance of 90% of 32b instructions by 10%, but it would also decrease the performance of 10% of 32b instructions by 200%. If MS/Intel were to force all 32b instructions to be processed in the new way by default, everyone would have to test every single 32b application ever developed to see if it still ran acceptable. That means digging out decade old applications that have been chuging along merrily for years with out maintenance, full testing cycles on every app from calculators to office apps, to databases, video games, media players, etc... everything running on 32b instructions would have to be tested. And once you find all apps that were effected by that 10% issue, you have to find the vendor, who may or may not still be in business, the code, which may or may not be in a code repository, and someone familiar with the technology to fix the problem.

The cost of doing such a thing would be astronomical!

If however, MS/Intel offered a choice between which 32b instruction engine to use, defaulted to the existing system, and allowing developers to pass specific commands to change the instruction engine to the new one, they could avoid dealing with all of their legacy apps. Sure, the developers will have to pass an extra command while coding for 32b systems (obviously 64b, 128b, etc... systems would not require the use of that command), but since that would be done on applications that are actively being worked on, the investment to do so is trivial and the test cycle will be performed regardless of the instruction engine.

Small, non-IT companies do face a burden making even the smallest changes, true. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't reap what they've sown.

So what you're saying is that any developer who in the last 4 years has developed a website using a strict doctype and working to ensure the page renders correctly in both IE and FF using browser specific nuances to do so while remaining as close to the standard as possible should be liable for any damages that may occur to any of their clients due to MS changing their rendering engine years after they developed the web site?

I find it slightly ironic that the people who argue so strongly against quirks mode are so in favor of crucifying developers who used strict mode.

As far as my business is concerned, I'd do it free of charge, and treat is as nothing more than a maintenance issue.

Gre

Re:It's the most logical decision

[RingDev]

I think that is an excellent post from the point of view of an IT professional, web developer, or web administrator.

I agree that the worst case on this is not an end of the world issue. It could have ramifications though, and in today's environment of litigation before logic, it makes sense to limit all liabilities, even those that have a extremely unlikely worst case scenario.

Take a look at it from the point of view of the users, of the CIOs, of the small business owners, and from MS's side. There is a fair amount of risk involved in this change over, and the temporary (and sweet jebus do I hope it's temporary) use of a stop-gap can absolutely remove all of that risk, for an insignificant investment.

-Rick

Re:It's the most logical decision

[James McGuigan]

It may be trivial to add one line of code to a file, if its a current or semi-recent project.

But if its an unmaintained website, running on an old server / web hosting account, then you have to factor in all the setup costs of fetching a current of the code and login, getting it up and running on your local machine, along with the whole dev enviorment required to support it (which may include things like: dreamweaver, php, perl, java), doing the change, testing the change hasn't broken anything elsewhere, and redeploying.

For a non-techie, who has paid for a website but knows little about HTML, telling them they have to change their existing site to deal with a new browser is just going to go over their heads.

MS's solution here is to maintain backwards compatibility with the existing non-standard web HTML, and allow new websites the option of building to the standards.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[Phillup]

We are about to come full circle in the conversation.

The cost is not minimal for existing web pages, that's the whole damn point. While something is under development, it's absolutely trivial to insert one line of code. It adds next-to-no effort to the process. Once something is no longer under development, however, it may not be that easy. If there's someone already there who can maintain the site, then it's easy, but it's not so easy if that isn't the case. At the very least (and I'm sure that someone would want to do it in a more complicated way than this), it involves hiring someone to make that change to the template. If the site doesn't have an easy way to change it in one spot, it involves even more work. I agree whole heartedly.

Now, as someone that built my pages to the standard... why should I have to revisit each and every one of them to add a meta tag to tell IE8 to render the page properly?

It is ALWAYS much cheaper to make a tiny modification to a project which is underway than to hire someone just to do that modification, because although it takes only 5 minutes of work, the guy who did it will happily charge a full hour of labor for the occasion. A developer on an active project will still charge the full hour, but those other 55 minutes will be filled with useful work, not dead space. The future isn't the issue.

At the end of the day, some group of web developers will have to go back and fix some web pages to get them to work with IE8. Either those that followed the standards, or those that used hacks to support IE.

Those that followed the standards will have to do it to signal to IE8 that their page is to be rendered following the standards if a meta tag is needed to send this signal to IE8.

Or... a meta tag could be used to signal to IE8 that it should render in "legacy" mode for people that used IE specific hacks to get current versions of IE to work.

I believe the "cost" should be born by those who specifically elected in the past to support IE.

And, nothing special should be needed for a browser that (finally) works properly.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[bigstrat2003]

No one should be fixing old pages, that's the point. If your site looked wrong in IE before, it still will now. If you really want to make it work, that's your prerogative, but the point is not to improve what exists, it's to improve the future.

Re:It's the most logical decision

[CrazedWalrus]

Sure, except that temporary measures are very seldom temporary. They wind up being part of a baseline that people just assume they need to do. Maybe if they name the meta header "X-IE8-Compat-Kludge-Dont-Use-After-2010" does stuff like this stand any chance of actually going away.

Extend, Embrace, Extinguish

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuff said!

so?

[gandhi_2]

This just in...

Firefox doesn't either.

Re:so?

[peragrin]

Firefox 3 should be ale to pass the acid 2 test. They have been working on it, and they don't introduce custom extensions to doctypes to render correctly, rather they are fixing their browser itself.

MSFT dug itself into a hole. instead of getting out and filling the hole back in they are digging another hole to bring people down to their level.

Re:so?

[scubamage]

Not to mention FF 3 is able to at least *mostly* render Acid3, and once its out of beta i wouldn't be surprised if it was fully compliant. Also, Acid 3 is still in testing. I just don't get why microsoft insists on eschewing standards. They exist for a reason, so people only have to do something once. Ugh, idiocy, thy name is microsoft.

Re:so?

[bigstrat2003]

No, THIS IS getting out of the hole and filling it back in, or at least, the first step in that line. Here's how it should go (not necessarily how Microsoft is planning it, but how it should go):

IE8 has the strict standards mode, web developers adopt it for all their new sites, and update old ones as best they can.
Wait 6 years or so (or pick your timeframe, if you don't like that one).
Now the majority of pages that are on the interweb have the strict standards rendering tag in, and IE8 or later makes up 90% of the IE users.
Next version of IE doesn't require the special tag to render in strict standards mode.

You may disagree with this course of action, which is your prerogative, but to say that they're "digging another hole", and not trying to fix the problem, is insane.

Re:so?

[Bogtha]

they don't introduce custom extensions to doctypes to render correctly

Firefox, like most other browsers, uses doctype switching. If it didn't, they'd have to choose between breaking compatibility with a hell of a lot of websites or following the specifications. The only difference here is that Microsoft are using the standard HTML way of including metadata rather than using the doctype as a heuristic.

Re:so?

[gandhi_2]

FF3 beta doesn't do acid2 either.

You know..someone should have patented the web browser. As a requirement to license the name "web browser" you could have to agree to standards.

Then Microsoft could call IE a "microsoft browser" instead of "web browser" and everyone would be happy.

Re:so?

[jrumney]

That's not true. Microsoft are using doctype switching, but rendering it differently than what they know they should according to that doctype. They then have this meta tag to override the incorrect rendering and render it properly.

If they did the same as every other browser, and tried their best to render every page according to its doctype, then developers would fix their pages, and the web would look the same on all modern browsers. By employing this hack, they give web developers a path to avoid updating their pages and as a bonus those pages will continue to display as designed with IE6. Of course those pages will never display properly on the competitions' browsers, a bonus from Microsoft's point of view. I see another EU antitrust investigation coming.

Re:so?

[scubamage]

Wouldn't mosaic technically get the patent then, IE Netscape?

Serious question:

[Mongoose Disciple]

Other than being able to pass the ACID test(s), what would it really mean to Microsoft either way if IE8 did or didn't?

Re:Serious question:

[kellyb9]

what would it really mean to Microsoft either way if IE8 did or didn't? Absolutely Nothing.

Re:Serious question:

[Firehed]

Other than for security reasons, a lot of the reason that people recommend using a browser to others that isn't MSIE is page rendering. If they can remedy that, people have less of an incentive to use or recommend alternate browsers - the practical upshot of which to MS is presumably more people using MSN search which translates to ad revenue.

Plus it shows a lot of goodwill. Even as a MS-hating Mac user, I have to admit that they're doing a lot more recently to actually make their customers happy, or at least try. If you create stuff that people want, they'll use it on their own. The old model was lock-in by force, creating all sorts of ill-will and getting a lot of people looking for ways out of the platform. If you just give people what they want, there's no need for the shackles. Sort of making software for their customers rather than their business model, if you will.

For ME, I've locked myself into Firefox because it offers all the features I want (namely, extensions). Previously, I was locked into IE because I had no other choice. The old approach not only meant that I jumped ship as soon as an opportunity arose, but it meant that I love their competition. You know how marketing experts say that you absolutely do not want to have price be your only selling point? It's even worse when your only selling point is a lack of options. When Firefox became a viable option for me, I made the switch. Same for the Mac platform. There's a lot for Microsoft to lose by having their only competitive advantage being their having enough leverage to force their products down your throat. Making IE not suck is certainly in their best interest.

Litmus test

[Anonymous Coward]

The only test that matters with IE: will it uninstall? Probably fails that test, too.

Just stick to the standards

[gilesjuk]

All this IE specific websites rubbish is to blame for all the complexity.

Stick to the standards, keep your website clean and relatively uncomplex in layout (ie. usable and readable).

If you see pages render in an odd way and your HTML validates well then it's a bug in the browser and it should be fixed not kludged using CSS tricks (which may break another browser).

Amazon and other sites seem to manage to sell lots of stuff and don't state to use IE or particular versions of a browser. So why do others not emulate their success?

First Thing I Noticed

[dctoastman]

Håkon Wium Lie CTO, Opera Software
I'm sorry, but I can't trust his opinion on a competing product.

Re:First Thing I Noticed

[Bigjeff5]

Well, if you had bothered RTFA all the way, you might have noticed the bio at the end and seen this guy is one of the people who developed the CSS standard for W3C.

The fact that he is the CTO for a competing browser should also add to his qualifications in speaking on this specific subject.

As for trustworthiness, if you had RTFA you might have realized that one of the three possibilities he gave is the one that Microsoft themselves have essentially said they are going use (that's the opt-in for web developers to force IE8 to run in truly standards compliant mode). The other two options he gave are pretty much the only two left, that I can think of anyway.

The microsoft article linked to in TFA essentially says they operate around a "don't force web developers to alter current pages" directive, which leaves only the three options, all of which means that IE8 will not be standards compliant EVER, which means it will NEVER pass Acid2 OR Acid3, unless they hard code the url into the browser.

If they do that, then I can almost guarantee the Acid test guys will slightly alter the url for the test, thus forcing IE8 to use defaults, in which case it will fail, because the default for IE8 will be non-standards compliant.

Did that help at all?

K thx bye.

Re:First Thing I Noticed

[dctoastman]

So, you trust Microsoft when speaking on Linux? Or the IE team speaking on Opera?

When I read an opinion from someone who has a stake in the outcomes, I'm default skeptical. Regardless if the company makes me all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

Duh.

[MonsterTrimble]

Oh Shit! And the earth isn't flat? Say it ain't so!

Two pages for IE

[Phillup]

Great.

Now you'll have to create TWO pages... one for IE7 and one for IE8.

Wanna bet people say something along the lines of: Why develope for IE8 when it will render my IE7 page perfectly BY DEFAULT.

I think they have it backwards... add the meta tag if you want the browser to go into "broken IE" mode.

Obviously none of you read the blog post

[The Psyko]

of the IE developer.

"I doubt Acid2, nor Acid3 will have Microsoft extensions in them."

Well I doubt you have half a brain. Acid2 and Acid3 are developed by WaSP, which were the people that helped Microsoft develop the meta-tag solution in the first place. So there is a good chance that they WILL have the Microsoft extensions in them. Not that a meta tag is really a "Microsoft extension."

Ah, backward compatibility

[Reality Master 201]

All of this trouble, just so the hundreds of crappy IE only intranet apps all across the US will continue to work without any changes.

Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and just make people upgrade their apps to support a non-brain dead, IE specific version of HTML (+ random crap).

Re:Ah, backward compatibility

[KingMotley]

Ah yes, I'm glad you agree. Now please write my company a check for $250,000 so we can take our web-based AR package out of maintenance and upgrade it to the next version that will support the latest browsers. Oh, and of course the check to cover retraining the 30 or so users, so just tack on another $60,000. And we'll need a check for the IT guys that have to actually roll this out. Soon as I get that check, we're all good to go. Otherwise, I'll thank Microsoft for saving our company nearly $500k on that one application alone.

Re:Ah, backward compatibility

[Chosen Reject]

Were you also in favor of changing how we record time just so we could save money on Y2K issues that came up because idiots didn't think we'd ever reach the turn of the century?

Hey everyone, I propose a fix to the Unix time conundrum. At 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, I propose we just switch all time to Midnight January 1, 1970. That way we don't have to spend any money fixing any problems.

Hear! Hear!

[Per Abrahamsen]

I'm all for Microsoft flames (just read any of my comments about Vista), but this really is the most reasonable option. The web always had a tradition of favoring user experience over elegance, just look at the content of the User-Agent field. The cost of putting an extra tag on standard compliant web pages is negligible, compared with the cost of showing all the old, broken web pages incorrectly.

I suppose msie8.exe could have a "/mode=std" switch so it could still technically pass the Acid test.

Eh?

[Luke Dawson]

[Another] scenario could be that Microsoft requires Web pages to change the default settings by flagging that they really, really want to be rendered correctly.

So all this time, they've assumed that we don't want our pages rendered correctly? Hmmm, that actually explains a lot...

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

[Gary W. Longsine]

There. Fixed it for you.

The acid test...

[ZwJGR]

IE8 appears to be basic...

This is Microsoft's mistake to pay for

[MobyDisk]

The reason this is happening is because IE6 already actually uses the doctype tags. Depending on the doctype, it renders in quirks mode or in standards compliance mode, just like Firefox. The problem is that the standards compliance mode isn't even close to standards compliant. So now we have quirks mode, IE6 standards compliance mode, and IE7 standards compliance mode. Microsoft dug this hole and now the only way to fix it without breaking pages is to add yet another mechanism.

Microsoft kept redefining the meaning of "standard" so that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Now that they are actually starting to follow the standard, they are scrambling trying to make sure that it doesn't look like they were ever wrong.

Re:This is Microsoft's mistake to pay for

[Jugalator]

Now that they are actually starting to follow the standard, they are scrambling trying to make sure that it doesn't look like they were ever wrong. Not really -- if they wished to make it look like that, they wouldn't have introduced a tag like this. To me, this is Microsoft's way of, to the contrary, confirming that they've been wrong in the past. Not that that makes the situation any better.

Re:This is Microsoft's mistake to pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they should put out a forced update for IE 6 and IE7 that adds compatibility with their new flag, and then make IE8 pay attention to the doctype. Then people who want the old craptacular behavior can ask for it explicitly, and those who don't have the stupid tag and have the the doctype set to strict get the new hotness, just like they're supposed to.

Then people can just change their server config to add the "deprecated behavior" flag if they don't want to change their current pages.

Class action suit?

[Daniel Phillips]

Why not turn this complaint into a class action suit? It seems to me that putting right this sort of wrong is exactly the purpose of this legal mechanism. Surely the financial harm can be easily estimated.

Re:Class action suit?

[unlametheweak]

Businesses can do as they please, but consumers can always vote with their browsers.

Re:Class action suit?

[twistedsymphony]

Businesses can do as they please, but consumers can always vote with their browsers.

The problem is that they don't usually vote that way but rather with a combination of ignorance and laziness.

Re:Class action suit?

[devjj]

Most consumers don't know they even have a choice.

Re:Class action suit?

[unlametheweak]

Indeed, as with any democracy the outcome of ones choices are not always optimal. It is always good to know that people have choices though. For me, a well rendered Web page would be able to display legibly in Lynx, but my vote is rather meaningless in that case. Forcing an issue with the use of lawyers is rather Draconian however.

Re:Class action suit?

[plague3106]

Huh? What finacial harm? If you want to put IE into standards mode, it requires a 10 second configuration change.

Re:Class action suit?

[jesuscyborg]

Businesses can do as they please, but consumers can always vote with their browsers.

Yes, consumers can "vote with their browsers" by choosing to use the ones that support all the awesome capabilities described in W3 standards! You know, those features that no website utilizes because IE doesn't support them.

New standards don't mean anything if no one uses them. A non-developer switching to a browser like Firefox simply because it "supports standards" would be like buying a high definition television fifteen years ago; you're still getting the same quality broadcasts.

W3 standards don't catch on because they're not intended for the end-user, they're intended for developers. End-users don't care that the columns on your website were coded in CSS rather than a table. If you want people to switch to a more developer friendly browser, you have to give 'em the old razzle dazzle. For example, let's say Macromedia Flash was introduced later in the game, relied on a W3C standard instead of a browser plugin, and that standard was only supported by non-IE browsers. Developers would be so anxious to use Flash that they would leave IE users in the dust, encouraging them to switch if they wanted to see the fancy dynamic content. IE users would then feel left out and switch to Firefox, which would end up with a 70% market share before Microsoft could even blink.

Re:Class action suit?

[MidnightBrewer]

Unfortunately, in the real world, the actual result is that you have to code pages for a specific, lowest common denominator, which means that you have to play nice with IE. Developers' goals are dictated by what they can expect from their audience, not their own personal whims. For every additional plug-in you require your users to download, you are losing potential audience that simply gives up. Making people who aren't looking for something better than IE download an entirely new browser is going to really hurt traffic, and traffic means money.

Having said that, as a developer, I really hate Microsoft's continuing efforts to make my web design efforts a nightmare. I get a page looking slick and clean in Firefox using good coding standards, only to have IE puke it back at me looking like a total mess.

Re:Class action suit?

[McFadden]

The problem is that they don't usually vote that way but rather with a combination of ignorance and laziness.

Welcome to Bush's America.

Re:Class action suit?

[cyphercell]

Well now you can just add in the official < MS workaround-tag > rather than adding BS tag here, MS specific CSS there, blah blah blah

Re:Class action suit?

[Daniel Phillips]

Why not turn this complaint into a class action suit? It seems to me that putting right this sort of wrong is exactly the purpose of this legal mechanism. Surely the financial harm can be easily estimated. So some Microsoft Employee thought my suggestion was a troll, hmm? No, completely serious.

Re:Class action suit?

[devjj]

Except we shouldn't have to. Browsers are supposed to render standards [b]correctly by default[/b]. There is no point in having a ubiquitous standard if you can't expect it to be operational by default.

Re:Class action suit?

[soliptic]

End-users don't care that the columns on your website were coded in CSS rather than a table. They do if they're blind.

Re:Class action suit?

[Daniel Phillips]

Huh? What finacial harm? If you want to put IE into standards mode, it requires a 10 second configuration change. And requires millions of sites to change their html if they want it to be rendered correctly in the default configuration of Microsoft's browser. Multiply the typical cost of the labor to change the site by all the sites affected, and there are your damages. Anybody care to make an estimate?

Re:Class action suit?

[cyphercell]

Oh I totally agree, if it were up to me the tag wouldn't be required to render properly, it would be used to render in quirks mode and it would look like < MS is a marketing company and I am not a developer >, but it sure as hell sounds better than fscking sitting there walking that fine line between standards compliant and the bastardized crap that render's proper in IE.

Reading...

[Bellum Aeternus]

So I actually read TFA, and it seems that this isn't just a MS thing; in fact it looks to be a standards thing that MS will just happen to be the first to support. Funny how the slashdot crowd automatically makes assumptions and jumps all over MS's case; even when they do something right.

The basic concept is preserving HTML based content for the future despite advancement in rendering software. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Reading...

[Anonymous Coward]

... actually read TFA, and it seems that this isn't just a MS thing; in fact it looks to be a standards thing that MS will just happen to be the first to support. Funny how the slashdot crowd automatically makes assumptions and jumps all over MS's case; even when they do something right.

Huh? I suppose you're referring to this sentence in the IE blog:

With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem.

I think you've just made a highly tendentious and inaccurate interpretation of that comment by the IE people. This has been cooked up by Microsoft's people's in consultation with one other group--and at Microsoft's request in order to try to sort out a problem Microsoft has. That most certainly does not make it a "standard" except in the alternate (and Microsoft-servile) reality in which you're living.

And while you're about it try reading some of the many other linked articles as well.

Re:Reading...

[_|()|\|]

it looks to be a standards thing that MS will just happen to be the first to support

Please direct me to the standard that describes the behavior of IE 6, 7, and 8. Someone had it right in the last article that this is just as bad as the <brokenLikeWord95> tags in OOXML.

Construing this situation charitably, it may not be painfully clear from the perspective of the Microsoft monopoly how repugnant this is, but the Web Standards Project should know better. Everyone else recognizes this as classic embrace and extend.

Re:Reading...

[jrumney]

Someone had it right in the last article that this is just as bad as the tags in OOXML.

No, its worse. At least in OOXML you have to explicitly request the undocumented broken behaviour.

Please live in the real world..

[Chris_Jefferson]

I replied on the previous thread on this.. I shouldn't really post again, but I feel I have to.

Yes, in a magical perfect world, Microsoft would use DOCTYPE to tell if a page wants standard-compatible rendering, and simply break all the pages which have a correct DOCTYPE but then rely, either on purpose or by accident, on IE6 and IE7 bugs. But most of their customers don't want them to, and so they aren't going to.

Therefore they are trying to offer an alternative. An alternative you can either put in as a meta tag or a HTTP header. I can't think of anything they could do in practice which would be better than this, other than the one thing they would never do, which is break old webpages which rendered correctly on IE6/7.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[colonslash]

Here's another alternative - stop delivering new versions of IE.

They had no problem not working on IE when it was by far the dominant browser.

IE doesn't offer anything useful, that should be in a web page, that other browsers don't.

ActiveX apps should not be created using web pages - they don't use web page standards. There should be a separate vehicle Microsoft has for delivering ActiveX.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[vitaflo]

Why should I have to put a custom tag into a standards compliant document? Furthermore why shouldn't this custom tag not be put into the non-standard IE6/7 pages to keep the bugs in tact if they want them?

When MS updates it's OS, it will often change the API which breaks a few things for some programs. It then gives devs ample time to make fixes so that their old programs work in the new OS. I'm not sure why a browser should be much different.

Nobody is saying that people who wrote a site for IE6 need to rewrite their entire site to be standards compliant. But if they want to use old and buggy crap, then make them add in the meta tags. Leave the crud in the past, don't pollute future sites with custom IE only tags just for the sake of standards compliance when something better already exists and is used by every other browser already.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[pigwin32]

The point you are missing is this; let's say I decide to make changes to my site that allow it to render correctly in IE8, I then add the meta tag and publish. At that point my site stops rendering correctly for all my customers who use IE7/IE6/IE5 - unless I do some sniffing and css/script hacks. Say hello to 1999. Until this point I have been writing pages to conform to standards and this has been a really successful strategy. Going forward I expect more browsers to have better standards' support and so the few hacks I do currently use can ultimately be relegated to the trash. However Microsoft will use this meta tag to introduce new features that break standards and their marketing weasels will mendaciously suggest that if you don't want the feature then don't set the meta tag. Guess what, some marketing roid in my organisation will at some point require the new feature and now I'm back to browser sniffing to figure out which browser supports which feature. That sucks.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[BeanThere]

A more correct solution (and better IMO) would be to implement a user option in IE itself e.g. "IE6/7 compatibility for older pages", or something like that. Make the default standards-based, but for older pages users could just select that option. I suppose that'll be too complex for many 'less technically literate' users. But still, MS made this mess, they shouldn't expect others to have to deal with the fallout of fixing it, nor create still new MS-specific tags that the entire world has to use forever just because of their broken client; that reeks of arrogance to me.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[FurryWhale]

A more correct solution (and better IMO) would be to implement a user option in IE itself e.g. "IE6/7 compatibility for older pages", or something like that. Make the default standards-based, but for older pages users could just select that option. I suppose that'll be too complex for many 'less technically literate' users.

That is more correct, but is it more practical? Do a Google search for "computer" and it'll say Results 1 - 10 of about 2,280,000,000 for computer. The set of pages broken by a standards-compliant browser is certainly smaller than 2.28 billion pages, but I bet it's still a pretty large number. Major, popular sites like Slashdot and MSNBC may be fixed to be standards-compliant, but what about my high school's web page? Local fire department? My geology professor's page on next week's homework? And remember, people like my mom surf the Internet. She gets confused when multiple applications are open.

But still, MS made this mess, they shouldn't expect others to have to deal with the fallout of fixing it, nor create still new MS-specific tags that the entire world has to use forever just because of their broken client; that reeks of arrogance to me.

MS actually reached out to organizations for help on coming up with a reasonable tag. Aaron Gustafson, not a Microsoft employee, wrote:

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.

I used to be an ultra idealist, but somewhere along the way I realized that there's this thing called 'reality'. It is reality that we live in.

Re:Please live in the real world..

[BeanThere]

I don't think the situation is necessarily quite as bad as you portray for 'your mom' and people like that, as many of those 'random' sites already render OK in different browsers, via whatever means (e.g. even if it's ugly hacks like browser detection followed by custom code and CSS, or other browsers supporting IE rendering quirks, they do) ... with a Gecko-based browser in Linux, for example, I can use already use most websites with no problems, and most websites also work in Safari and Opera. Nonetheless, there are still a significant enough percentage of sites that *don't* work for it to still be annoying.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're all standards-based, and of course the ideal is to get them there. I have to agree with you, IF Microsoft is *genuinely* trying to become standards-compliant (you must forgive my cynicism, past behaviour is about the best predictor of future behaviour and they forfeited their right to 'benefit of the doubt' long ago, so they'll have to work hard to prove it to people like me who happen to do web development on occasion) ... I digress ... as I was saying, IF MS is genuinely trying to become standards-compliant, then indeed, I don't see too many other options available to steer the world out of this morass. A giant database of what all websites properly conform to? Hmm, no. A user-selectable option, well, I know plenty enough users probably far less knowledgeable than your mom who wouldn't have a clue. The only other option is using their dominant position to take a hard line - this would REALLY show me they're serious - if they stood up and said, listen, we are so intent on standards, that the default rendering mode will be standards-based, and you'll need to add a meta-tag for IE6/7 rendering. All the major, 'important' sites will definitely do that if needed (banking, news, etc.). That's also a more 'future-sensible' option, as it doesn't pollute with extra tags in the long run. All those companies that built specialised IE6-specific Intranets will have to update them to include the 'IE6/7' tag, or use standards.

Thing is, there are so many IE6/7s out there that we're going to still have to code for the damn things probably five years from now, if not longer (I know I should take a longer term view, of course, but I don't want to be doing websites forever). I Anyway, it would be nice if a little 'forceful persuasion' could be used to get the outdated people onto more standards-based browsers. But that's about as hopeless as getting them to select a user option ... arg, indeed, there is no other way. The problem is all those sites out there that won't or can't be updated for whatever reasons to include my hypothetical 'IE6/7' tag -- and you can't just break half the Web. If there is a better way out, I don't see it.

Standards Shmandards

[kellyb9]

Seriously, does this really suprise anyone? Lets say for a second you're Microsoft - what is the adcentive to actually follow these standards. Compatibility? Maybe, but most Web sites are designed with IE in mind. Possibly one of the single largest headaches in web development, but it's a reality folks. MS is only interested in compatibility where it benefits them. If they can devise ways to build plug-ins to their applications, they will... 100% of the time. This wouldn't work for Mozilla, and it wouldn't work for Apple, but it will work for Microsoft... for now. Features are the name of the game for these competitors now. Sure all of them can effectivly render pages, but what can they offer that Microsoft can't or won't? It used to be tabbed browsing, widgets, or extensions. I'm not really sure what it is now, but maybe that's why I'm not out designing browsers.

IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Myopic]

I just want to point out that these ongoing shenanigans show that IE is not a web browser. The whole world (including Microsoft) got together and decided exactly what a "web page" is and wrote it down in very clear specifications. So, anyone who writes a piece of software that renders a web page, as defined by those specifications, is a web browser. If you write software that does anything else, then that isn't a web browser. Therefore, insofar as IE does not render web pages, it is not a web browser. So, if anyone complains that your documents don't look right when they view them in IE, gently explain to them that your documents are web pages, and to view them the person needs a web browser, and IE isn't a web browser.

That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is.

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have been getting a low 5-digit id when they were handing clues out to everyone else.

By your logic there is no web browser in existence. Firefox and Opera sure as hell do the wrong thing on occasion. There are cases where Firefox deliberately (as in "will not fix") breaks the standards. And Lynx doesn't even try to lay the page out as the CSS demands.

In your fantasy world of perfect standards compliance your web pages are viewable by nobody.

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[TypoNAM]

And Lynx doesn't even try to lay the page out as the CSS demands.
Why the fuck would a console web browser support CSS?
Apparently in your fantasy world everything should support CSS even when isn't suppose to!

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[barzok]

And Lynx doesn't even try to lay the page out as the CSS demands.

"Demands"? The browser isn't required to obey the CSS at all. You can suggest lots of things in a CSS file, but my browser settings can override them all day long - colors, font sizes, font faces, etc.

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

By that same logic, Firefox isn't a browser at the moment either.

Personally, I refer to Firefox as a "web windowshopper". Hopefully I'll actually start browsing one of these days.

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is. Um... a web browser?

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[R3d Jack]

"That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is."

Sadly, it's the standard, and "Web browser" is irrelevant. Even commercial software specifically codes to IE, and it won't work in FF. The IT Director refuses to eliminate apps just because they are not "Web browser" compliant. What's his problem? I'm just glad M$ is doing something to straighten this mess out.

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[John Courtland]

That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is.

A gaping security hole?

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[andruk]

Just to let a few people know, this is a joke, and should not be taken to mean that i am implying anything wrong with Microsoft or IE in any way. As previously stated, to do so would be to declare myself a terrorist, which I am not. That being said, please delay the "flamebait" mod feelings for just a bit:

To answer your question:
A stinking, steaming pile of shitty code?

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

That leaves open the question of exactly what IE is.

No, it leaves us with the question of "what is the Web if the majority of the content does not adhere to your academic definition"?

Re:IE Is Not A Web Browser

[Duke Blazingstix]

gently explain to them that your documents are web pages, and to view them the person needs a web browser, and IE isn't a web browser

Yeah, because I like spending an hour arguing with my boss/client over semantics.

History repeats itself

[guruevi]

1995 called, they want their and tags back

I'll tell you what's amazing

[dmgxmichael]

All of this whining about Microsoft's approach to standards implementation on IE 8 sounds like it is coming from a bunch of academic eggheads who've not held a job in web development in their lives. I, like most web developers that have a job have been using user_agent sniffs for some time to make sure that IE 6's wonky non-standard approach is accounted for. I suspect that many have done the same as I - look for "MSIE" in the string, make the adjustments for MS's buggy implementation, and call it a day. So if Microsoft suddenly goes compliant every one of those pages will break. The only reason I didn't face a mass break on IE 7 is IE 7 goes to quirks mode when the doctype is missing (and it's missing on most all my legacy pages. My newer pages have them and I had to fix 12 of them for IE 7's changes).

Microsoft doesn't follow standards. I don't know about some of you nerds but I've got some 300 sites that have code that will break if MS decides to follow the standard. I don't personally like the idea of going in and rewriting the drive code for those pages again. Yes, it would have been better if Microsoft had followed the standard in the first place but they didn't and as far as I can tell this is about the only way out of the problem they've created for them.

Now I know that in the fantasy world of some the moment a new version of IE comes out the pages written to the bad standard MS foisted on us dissappear - but that isn't the case. Hell, there are pages out there still written for Netscape 4. Microsoft has the unenviable position of striking a balance between the needs of the development community - one standard to rule them all - and the clients of those developers - "I don't give a damn what you have to do to make it work, just make it work."

I don't know about the rest of you, but if my old clients started coming to me because their pages look like crap in the newest IE the words, "but it's Microsoft's fault - tech blah blah blah blah" they'll won't accept the explanation - because for most of them the explanation involves technical details they don't give a damn about and they pay us to handle for them because we're supposed to be the professionals. At the end of the day the majority of the world doesn't give a flying rat's hindquarters about standards - they simply want the web to work.

Microsoft does a lot of asinine crap that they fully deserve to be taken to task for - but this isn't one instance of it. Breaking pages to make way for the "future" would only further the drive of folks to other browsers.

All of that said, Microsoft has a cleaner solution available to them - change IE 8's http_user_agent string so completely that browser sniffing software will (presumably) feed them the standards compliant page. Personally that's what I do - if you're using IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera I'll adjust for your browser bugs - if not you'd better be able to handle CSS 2.1 strict cause that's what you're gonna get.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[TheSunborn]

So all Microsoft have to do is to change the user agent string to something that will not trigger ie6/7 workaround. That way they don't need a third render mode, but will get the same code as firefox and other browsers.

That does ofcause only work if ie8 can show code as well as firefox.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[Bogtha]

So all Microsoft have to do is to change the user agent string to something that will not trigger ie6/7 workaround.

Yes, and that will mean that Internet Explorer 8 users get turned away from many sites and any legacy bugs remaining will cause problems again despite web developers already providing an Internet Explorer fix.

Defaulting to backwards compatibility is the only way to avoid mass regressions. Any developer who wants the new mode can select it very easily. I have hated Internet Explorer for years because of its impact on my work, and even I can acknowledge that this is the best approach.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[JackHoffman]

I think it's amazing that people who knowingly declare wrong document types still get jobs as web developers. I think it's amazing that they think they're doing it to be professional.

The way to solve this is to make IE8 render all existing document types as IE6 or IE7 renders them, and implement new document types without deviating from the standard, to avoid a rerun of the current episode. Of course that is not an option, because it means that IE would remain stuck in 2001 for quite some time (until the IE team has the HTML5 rendering engine ready) while the other browsers can continue to render fancy CSS websites, and it means the IE team would have to actually create a complete standard implementation. As I said, not an option.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[dotancohen]

So _you_ wrote non-standards compliant pages. Now _you_ can go back and change them. That's right, you bent over backwards supporting Microsoft's broken habits, now you can pay the piper. I stopped coding for IE around late 2006 and you know what? I do not need to recode anything that I've done since then.

If users insist on using a broken browser then I let them see a broken webpage. Let them know the headaches that MS has done to those who design the web. Better yet, let those who choose to use their products (and those who choose to support their products, like you) suffer the headaches now.

I'm full aware of the fact that some people stopped looking at my sites because IE doesn't display them nice. I suffered the loss of advertising income. And you know what? It was worth it.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[styrotech]

Calling opponents of what MS is doing "academic eggheads" is extremely short sighted. The opponents of this care about the web and it's infrastructure as a whole (including browser developers) rather than just a bunch of badly hacked up user agent sniffing sites they have to maintain.

If you think user agent sniffing is the only way to do your job then I would question how you could call yourself a professional web developer.

Going down the path MS is creating by adding new rendering modes will only end in madness as every webdesigner has to specify what browser version that site is to be rendered with. When there was only quirks mode and standards mode, most people didn't see that as a problem even if the "academic eggheads" did. But will it become a problem when browsers need to support 5 different IE rendering modes, 3 different Firefox rendering modes, 2 different Opera rendering modes etc etc? Or does only MS get the privilege of writing buggy browsers that every other browser writer have to emulate?

Effectively there won't be any web standards once you get to that point - web sites will end up just be coded to one of a dozen different rendering engines. That sets back all the hard won recent progress that has been made with promoting web standards. As only MS will have the clout to make everyone follow their rendering bugs, that puts MS back in charge of browser innovation (or lack thereof) as the other browsers end up chasing their tail in an eternal Samba like reverse engineering effort. How is that good for the web as a whole? Everyone ends up with buggier bloated browsers that are harder to maintain by their developers.

All this just because some webdesigners were too lazy to figure out how to do their jobs properly, and too shortsighted to see the bigger picture of what is at stake. This isn't MS getting out of the problem they created, it is MS perpetuating it even though they have finally created a standards compliant browser. Quirks modes should be opt-in rather than opt-out, and the aim should be to eventually leave them behind rather than lock them in place forever.

Quoting another comment: MS desire to "not break the web" really means "not fix the web". Every other new IE version has done similar things before - why is it now a problem?

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[TheSunborn]

But even if ie8 starts in "super standard mode" a site is only giving problems with ie8 if it have a doctype, and don't work in standard browsers, such as firefox. (If firefox can render it, so can ie8 super standard mode).

And it is many years ago I saw such a buggy site. (In fact I can't think of any site where there would be problems right now.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[dmgxmichael]

When your clients are paying 5 to 6 figures per site you do what they say. They say make it work in IE and you make it work in IE, standards be damned. I'm happy you can afford to ignore the browser with the largest market share, I can't even though I wish I could.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[dotancohen]

When your clients are paying 5 to 6 figures per site you do what they say. I couldn't agree with you more.

They say make it work in IE and you make it work in IE, standards be damned. That's where the problem is. Did the client say "make sure that the site is NOT standards compliant. If you could not write a site that works in IE _and_ is standards compliant, then what are they paying you 6 figures for? Did you even make a point of explaining to them that making the site standards compliant now would save them another 6 figures down the road when they don't have to rewrite it?

I'm happy you can afford to ignore the browser with the largest market share, I can't even though I wish I could. I know that I am in a privledged position in that I don't have to answer to anybody. I also respect that not everybody is in that position. However, I do expect a professional to educate his customer, and to do what is in the better interest of the profession.

Re:I'll tell you what's amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

However, I do expect a professional to educate his customer, and to do what is in the better interest of the profession.

Well I can make a site that'll work on around 90% of the user base. The remaining 10% consists of scattered browsers used by a minority which comply to a standard. If I target the standard then you'll have a great "standard compliant" site which the other 80% will be able to use in a few years. It'd totally impress people on Slashdot tho!

On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus

[dereference]

IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. Allow me to vehemently disagree with this premise. As it has been said, "no, there is ... another" and in this case there is an option you and Microsoft have totally overlooked. Think of the ignored person behind the keyboard; let the user decide!

Yes, let the site break by default. Let it render like hell, without any change to the site. Just offer the user a "try to make this site look better" button, that will switch through the various so-called "compatibility" rendering modes.

Microsoft always does this; they ignore the user and focus on the developers (recall Ballmer's silly rant). Think about that for a moment. Their real market demand comes more indirectly from developers building software (yes, including web sites) that need Microsoft, and they know that.

But they're not blind to the users, nor do they always fear change. Think of the XP interface for folks who upgraded from 2000. It looked like a cartoon and took up lots of real estate. Users adapted; a change caused by an upgrade didn't bother them in the long run. Some [gasp] even found that Microsoft provided a nice "classic" option that restored their old look at feel. Even IE7 removed the menu bar by default, but let users restore it.

Now--stay with me for a context shift--the same can be true of a browser. The browser is a client-side piece of software. It can be upgraded, and the upgrade can make things different. Yes, even by default. But let the users click a button to have IE re-render any broken sites (site-wide, of course). Oh, what a burden, I can hear you protest. Fine, let's allow users to even set a preference that all sites should be set to use this "compatibility" mode by default. Then, if some seldom-used site looks bad because a user managed to stumble across one of the few odd standards-compliant sites (please mind the sarcasm) then they can set an exception for this site.

Basically your premise there is flawed; there's a false dichotomy you've presented to fix the breaking of millions of sites. Both of your solutions require the developers to take some action, one indeed less painful than the other.

I'm fine, Microsoft, with you inventing and respecting some non-standard tag, but let me be the voice of developers everywhere begging you to please let us summarily ignore this. Further, I suggest (yes, I'm still talking to you, Microsoft!) you not burden your prized developers any further, and actually consider distributing the pain as a much smaller burden on the end-users. They can and will adapt, soon, as long as you're sure to empower them with sufficient options to fix for themselves the mess you've made by thumbing your nose at web standards for all these years. It's Ok, admit you were wrong about web standards and do an about-face, just as you did with the Internet itself a decade ago.

Re:On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus

[Bogtha]

Yes, let the site break by default. Let it render like hell, without any change to the site. Just offer the user a "try to make this site look better" button, that will switch through the various so-called "compatibility" rendering modes.

Microsoft always does this; they ignore the user and focus on the developers

You advocate breaking things by default and claim Microsoft are the ones ignoring the needs of the users?

I'm fine, Microsoft, with you inventing and respecting some non-standard tag

<meta> has been a standard HTML "tag" (you mean element type) for 13 years, first introduced in HTML 2.0 in 1995.

let me be the voice of developers everywhere begging you to please let us summarily ignore this.

Don't presume to speak for everybody.

Re:On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus

[dereference]

You advocate breaking things by default and claim Microsoft are the ones ignoring the needs of the users? You seem not to understand the situation. "Things" as you so eloquently wrote are already broken. Horribly. Look around at all the IE-only sites. Indeed my suggestion exposes those sites for what they are, if ever so briefly, until users bother to click a simple button to fix it all. The users will adapt. They're not nearly as fragile as you (or Microsoft, in this particular case) seem to think. NB: Site developers can avoid forcing users to click this button, if they fix their sites to be standards-compliant.

>meta< has been a standard HTML "tag" (you mean element type) for 13 years, first introduced in HTML 2.0 in 1995. Actually I do mean "tag" as in an instance of the "meta" element type. Trust me, I understand the concept, but your point is irrelevant, as I'm not arguing for or against the tag itself. I just want to freely ignore it, indefinitely, without ramifications. I want to follow published vetted and agreed-upon standards. Don't start down this path of "it's been in the spec since [whenever]" because you'll find Microsoft hasn't really played that game.

Don't presume to speak for everybody. Far from it, but read the comments here and in the related article from yesterday. Then, carefully, re-read my statement that prompted your snide response. Notice how I'm speaking only for those few who seem to have some tiny misgivings about this whole proposal. Just a small group, clearly not including you.

Re:On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus

[Bogtha]

"Things" as you so eloquently wrote are already broken.

Not as far as users are concerned. As far as developers are concerned, sure, but we're talking about users here. If they visit a website and it works, then upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and it breaks, then Microsoft is responsible as far as the user is concerned.

The users will adapt.

Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing.

Actually I do mean "tag" as in an instance of the "meta" element type. Trust me, I understand the concept

A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element.

I want to follow published vetted and agreed-upon standards.

There is nothing in this mechanism preventing you from doing that.

Don't start down this path of "it's been in the spec since [whenever]" because you'll find Microsoft hasn't really played that game.

You claimed that Microsoft invented a non-standard tag. The simple fact of the matter is that they have done no such thing in this case. Complaining that Microsoft ignores specifications doesn't change the fact that your accusation was false.

Re:On bad assumptions and lack of proper focus

[dereference]

Not as far as users are concerned. As far as developers are concerned, sure, but we're talking about users here. If they visit a website and it works, then upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and it breaks, then Microsoft is responsible as far as the user is concerned. True! I agree. You're absolutely correct. Further, the users are absolutely correct! This is exactly my point. Microsoft should bite the bullet now, rather than dragging this on indefinitely.

Users aren't so pathetic that they can't even understand that an upgrade might break something. Really, they're not morons. Users worldwide seemed not to panic when they first saw XP boot up. They managed, and they adapted. The same can (and should, as I propose) happen with IE.

Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing. The plain truth is that users are going to have to deal with it anyway. Developers can't possibly retrofit every single web site on the planet. I'm simply advocating that Microsoft step up to the plate and provide users with a single button to solve all their web woes. A single button. If you really think users are too fragile to understand that they've upgraded browsers and thus things might change, then I'd suggest you're being quite short-sighted, and perhaps confusing the concept of focus with that of coddling.

A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element. Yes, that's right, we're talking about the syntactic delimiter, not the (empty, in the case of "meta") element bounded by it. Thank you for this continued pedantry, but I don't think I'm going to get anywhere with you anyway, so I'll just leave it at that.

Foolproof way to pass Acid2

[RealGrouchy]

All IE8 needs to pass the Acid2 test is a simple LenPEG variant.

"If page = acid2 test, render http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/reference.html"

It can't fail!

- RG>

Re:Foolproof way to pass Acid2

[Anonymous Coward]

That has atleast two bugs.
The nose doesn't work, nor does the scrolling.

Re:Foolproof way to pass Acid2

[Bigon]

Be careful, are you sure the png image doesn't have an alpha channel?

Re:Foolproof way to pass Acid2

[savuporo]

I have thought about LenPEG a couple of times, and for a widely used compression libraries, similar trick would actually make a tiny, tiny bit of sense. Consider doing a tar.gz on a large GNU source trees. How many copies of verbatim GPL header are present in such a tree ? Lots. And they have to be there. And now assume that every file contains just one function, which is one of design approaches for large granular C libs. Now if by some compression format specific trick there would be a way to tag certain well known and oft-repeated fixed byte sequences with short bit strings and the rest with normal huffman trees, there could be some probably trivial and highly application-specific savings to be had. But in certain storage environments it could add up.

Hear hear

[Actually, I do RTFA]

For everyone's bitching, there is no other way out of this problem. There was an error before rendering. Many webpages specified a doctype, however were rendered incorrectly. To maintain backwards compatibility (critical*) and to maintain the spirt of the standards (desirable) the standard has to include something new that means "yes, I really do mean it." My solution would be to create XHTML 2.0 that is XHTML 1.0, without MS specific hacks.

*For those who don't believe this, how many of you made fun of MS for breaking backwards compatibility with "all apps need admin privledges" and created a "Cancel or Allow" dialog?

Re:Hear hear

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"For those who don't believe this [maintain backwards compatibility is critical], how many of you made fun of MS for breaking backwards compatibility with "all apps need admin privledges" and created a "Cancel or Allow" dialog?"

The typical slashdotter (which I ain't) would say in both cases:
"To hell with backwards compatibility. Microsoft should just follow the standards by default, and for any current website that gets broken, it's up to the web dev to fix it, and if he doesn't, too damn bad - the site will lose visitors which will force the web dev to either update it or watch as the site goes out of business. Similarly for apps needing admin privileges, Microsoft should've just made Vista so that such apps wouldn't run at all rather than throw up a "Cancel or Allow" dialog, and thereby force the app dev to update his app or go out of business."

So one *can* take a "backwards compatibility is NOT critical" stance and be consistent in both cases.

Re:Hear hear

[msuarezalvarez]

Well, the DOCTYPE was supposed to mean "yes, I really do mean it," and look where it got them. Maybe the whole idea is broken?

Re:Hear hear

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Well, the DOCTYPE was supposed to mean "yes, I really do mean it,"

So long as any major browser has one deviation from the standard, a static doctype cannot work. Therefore, a major release of Safari/Firefox/IE/Opera should make the XHTML standard one release version higher. In other words, seperate content that may use an old hack from those that don't.

Re:Hear hear

[the_B0fh]

I despair at the IT field. Who says there's no other method of doing the right thing? IE8 has it's own agent string.

For everyone who uses Doctype, it can be assumed that they're using some kind of html generator, and that generator is already generating two kinds of pages, one for IE and one for w3c compliant browsers.

Just have the web server treat IE8 as a w3c compliant web browser... and have IE8 treat the web page as a w3c compliant/standard page, problem solved. Why would IE8 ever have to render a standards compliant page in a non-standard manner? And in those cases, shouldn't the page indicate that it's an IE7/non-standard page?

Jesus H Christ, folks, this ain't rocket science.

Re:Hear hear

[hedwards]

I see absolutely no reason, why IE8 can't default to being standards compliant, and then pop up one of those annoying information thingies that MS is so fond of to fix it if the browser detects a possibly non-standard page or have the browser itself make the determination subject to an override. The browser really should be parsing the web page anyways, informing a user if the page is broken and which mode to try first shouldn't be that difficult if the alternate renderers are already there.

Most of the problems that web developers face are choosing whether to support IE or both IE and the standards. In many cases, the sites are going to be able to just remove the cludge that was hacked in to get things to render in IE 8 to use the standards.

IE7 & 8 right now probably only account for 60-80% of the marketshare in browsers, anybody that's leaving out the remaining portion is throwing away enough possible viewers that they deserve to be screwed by this. The numbers are getting more and more equal all the time, and we really aren't that far away from the case where coding for IE only is going to cost a full 1/2 of the possible viewers.

Businesses are going to switch over to more standards compliance as soon as humanly possible, it just doesn't make any business expense to pay more to develop for IE if there's the possibility of coding things in a standards compliant way which reaches similar numbers.

Re:Hear hear

[msuarezalvarez]

A static DOCTYPE cannot work but making pages permanently dependent on bugs in specific versions of browsers can?

Re:Hear hear

[psmears]

For everyone who uses Doctype, it can be assumed that they're using some kind of html generator, Why would you assume that? It's quite common to put the DOCTYPE tag in manually (and indiscriminately) - indeed, isn't that the root of the whole problem?

Re:Hear hear

[Actually, I do RTFA]

A static DOCTYPE cannot work but making pages permanently dependent on bugs in specific versions of browsers can?

Correct. New executables should not break old content. No matter what XHTML 1.0 was supposed to mean, it did mean that it supports IE 6. Hence, when we try the next iteration of content, even though it is aiming for the same standard as XHTML 1.0, it is a new version.

Re:Hear hear

[msuarezalvarez]

The root of the problem is the way Microsoft handled fixing bugs in their browser for years.

Re:Hear hear

[ichigo 2.0]

Precisely so. UAC is a stupid and useless hack, because when faced with the choice of running a piece of software with admin privileges or not running the software at all, the user will always choose the former. This eventually leads the less informed user to compulsively click allow on everything, and the more informed user to disable UAC completely.

Re:Hear hear

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Businesses are going to switch over to more standards compliance as soon as humanly possible, it just doesn't make any business expense to pay more to develop for IE if there's the possibility of coding things in a standards compliant way which reaches similar numbers.

New businesses, perhaps. But maintaining old code, and developing new code in the old way, is vital. It costs a lot of money to replace everything with new and shiny stuff.

Re:Hear hear

[msuarezalvarez]

So what you are saying is the only way to correctly implement the standard is to provide compatibility layers for all versions of all browsers.

Re:Hear hear

[Actually, I do RTFA]

So what you are saying is the only way to correctly implement the standard is to provide compatibility layers for all versions of all browsers.

No. What I am saying is that upgrading from IE6 to IE8 should not change any site that renders properly in IE6. If you want to create a new site that only works on IE8, or other standards compliant browsers, great. However, new content that follows that rule sould look different. Like, be written in XHTML 2.0

Re:Hear hear

[msuarezalvarez]

But that means that IE8 has to have a bug-for-bug compatibility layer for IE6 (and IE7). How, otherwise, are you going to achieve that? And of course IE9 will have to have such a thing for IE8, IE7 and IE6. And so on. So IE10 will have 5 implementations, say, CSS1, a standard published in 1997 and never changed since.

Re:Hear hear

[the_B0fh]

Well then, you can also do the other things you need to do by hand too.

Again, I don't see any issue here.

Re:Hear hear

[KDR_11k]

So if I were to implement a browser, how the fuck would I support this tag?

Re:Hear hear

[Kelson]

For everyone who uses Doctype, it can be assumed that they're using some kind of html generator, and that generator is already generating two kinds of pages, one for IE and one for w3c compliant browsers.

What gives you that idea?

Imagine, for a moment, that someone actually has static HTML, whether coded by hand or generated by a tool. Now imagine that it's designed based on standards and validated to avoid errors. Because of that, it uses the doctype switch to trigger standards mode in all browsers (IE isn't the only browser with a quirks mode, after all) so that they're all *ahem* on the same page.

Now, let's look at the question of IE. Perhaps they've avoided a few features that don't work in IE. Or used innocuous workarounds, for instance to trigger hasLayout on an element that would otherwise get caught by one of IE's bizarre layout bugs. Or relied on progressive enhancement, so that other browsers get nifty CSS selector effects, but the page still works without them. Perhaps they have a couple of conditional comments in the head to load some style rules to get around specific issues like PNG transparency in IE6.

In short, imagine a cross-browser-compatible website that relies on standards, but uses static HTML and a single version of each page, not any kind of on-the-fly generation.

Re:Hear hear

[the_B0fh]

Sure, I'd like my pie in the sky and eat it too. Anyone who generates web content by hand is only doing it for a handful of pages. They can take the time to regenerate it for IE8 if they want to properly support it.

Anyone who is using a tool can go get the updated version of that tool.

Why do people keep arguing over the stupidest of things?

Re:Hear hear

[Dutch Gun]

I think there's a point at which compatibility layers can be reasonably depreciated. At the moment, I'd guess the market still has a very large number of IE6 browsers in it. But when the [number of web pages affected by this] x [percentage of IE6 browsers] is sufficiently low that few enough care to make it an issue, the backward compatibility will be broken.

Re:Hear hear

[ThePromenader]

Hear hear. MS should know by now the hacks WM's use to correct its failings, so instead of shipping with three rendering engines, why not ship with one plus a "filter" that could parse bad (IE-targeted) code and render it correctly? Better still, why not tag pages coded for OLD versions of IE, and have the new version render correctly by default?

better non standard "standard" pages to change

[backslashdot]

So now Microsoft's philosophy really is "it's nota bug it's a feature". Sounds like an attempt by Microsoft to claim they are following standards without actually doing so.

How many web pages are in this supposed mode where they have their page marked as following the standard but actually don't?

Are there really web developers who made the mistake of marking their page as such instead of just unmarking the page as "standard following" ... after all if it is going to be broken ANYWAY in other browsers what's the point?

Anyway more and more people are saying screw the BS and switching to Macs (Safari).

De Facto and De Jure

[Effugas]

Alright, here's the reality of things:

People code their web pages to IE6, because that's what the vast majority of the userbase has. Now, enough of the userbase uses Firefox, such that it's worth testing and making sure rendering is reasonable enough there. But, seriously. People build to IE.

Now, this is not great. We should have consistent behavior, and follow superior engineering guidelines as realized through the standards process. People should be building not just to the De Facto standard of IE6, people should instead be building to the specifications made after the fact.

Note, by the way, the entire web is back-standardized, like (as far as I can tell) all good standards. First, build something that works, then remark on what makes things work. This is as opposed to the other way, which is to make a standard and hope it's useful.

So, here's the problem: You've got millions of pages built one way (to the browser), but this is a total pain for devs, who'd very much rather build them the other way (to the refined specification). What to do?

One model is to have the devs identify themselves. That's the tag that's been brought up.

The other model is to bring pain to all the devs who know nothing about the formal specifications, to silently but noticably break their sites. This seems very nice to those who are pissed at those devs for writing non-standards compliant code. It increases the cost in the future of such behavior occurring. Seems like a great idea, right?

In the real world, you don't really get to do that to your customers. Say what you will about Adobe, a Flash file will render the same no matter what, on all Flash players, ever. If the effect of the standardization process is that your code may silently explode in 18 months, forget standards, go for something that would never threaten you with that.

Is that what you want? No? Then relax, and realize that destructive migration paths do more damage to standards than anything else could.

Re:De Facto and De Jure

[jrumney]

People code their web pages to IE6, because that's what the vast majority of the userbase has.

IE6 has somewhere between 30% and 40% of the userbase. That's not a vast majority, and by the time IE8 comes out, it will have shrunken into insignificance.

Re:De Facto and De Jure

[Effugas]

Took a look at some servers I monitor. Indeed, 25% IE6, 40% IE7, 35% Gecko. Interesting -- I'd not realized the IE7 push had gone so well, or that Firefox's penetration was so high.

A Micro$oft spokesman said:

[Peet42]

"We love standards! We are responsible for releasing more new standards than anybody else! Hell, every release and patch we produce introduces several new standards..."

The real problem is Dreamweaver

[Animats]

The real problem isn't on the browser side. It's in Dreamweaver, the most popular web page design tool. Dreamweaver does not create valid HTML or XHTML. Not even close. Create a page in Dreamweaver for anything later than HTML 3.2 and run it through the W3C validator. It will fail.

The basic problem is that the Dreamweaver people never really figured out what to do about CSS. In theory, CSS is supposed to have some abstract model of the format of some block of text, like TeX does. In practice, there's usually a big block of CSS with machine-generated names at the beginning of the web page. There's a fundamental disconnect between the CSS model and the Dreamweaver "Properties" box. So Dreamweaver is still inserting I, B and FONT tags.

In layout, Dreamweaver does table-based layout quite well, but DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR layout isn't handled well. Much of this is due to the limitations of the DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR approach. Tables are a 2D grid system, and map well to the drag-the-lines editor in Dreamweaver. DIV/FLOAT/CLEAR doesn't map well to a visual layout editor.

The end result is a mess. And HTML 5 doesn't help.

Re:The real problem is Dreamweaver

[zmooc]

The only reason that Dreamweaver is the most popular web page design tool, is that nobody actually uses web page design tools to create web pages.

Re:The real problem is Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

What version of Dreamweaver are you using? 3? 4? For a long time now, DW has supported the strong tag, and friends. You can actually change in the preferences which one you'd like it to use by default. I haven't seen it insert a font tag in a long time. As far as W3C validation, I'm not sure what you're doing on your end, but my pages validate every time. You might want to look into Dreamweaver CS3, or 8 if you're strapped for cash.

Re:The real problem is Dreamweaver

[BShive]

I'm wondering if you ever noticed the 'XHTML Compliant' checkbox in Dreamweaver, or are using an ancient version. Yes, it has problems rendering CSS within the design view but will generate perfectly W3C valid pages. It also doesn't use any I, B or FONT tags when I'm editing. Granted I rarely edit in the design view, but your complaints are more valid to DW6, not the latest couple versions.

Re:The real problem is Dreamweaver

[mibus]

The only reason that Dreamweaver is the most popular web page design tool, is that nobody actually uses web page design tools to create web pages.

What do you base that on? I know plenty of people succesfully making pages in DW. (They probably don't validate, especially once butchered by quickly thrown-in PHP, but that's another point ;)

I can't stand it myself (vim for the win) and it's got the slowest FTP tool in existence, but it's most certainly used.

more than one point of view

[Crispy Critters]

"Thus, you need to specifically support IE in your web pages unless you're ok with leaving the majority of your potential users in the dark (which no sane person would be)."

That's where you make your mistake. Lots of sane people don't care how MSIE renders the web pages they create. These people are not commercial web developers. Two different groups, two different goals. A lot of things that other people do make no sense if you only look at them from your own perspective.

Re:Page specific tuning...How can it PASS the ACID

[davidsyes]

Test, when it's IN the acid nest?

What's the alternative?

[GottliebPins]

If what you are asking is for IE to be automatically standards compliant then that means thousands if not millions of pages written to the non-standards will break. The easier alternative is to let it render the old pages the old way and flag the new pages as standard compliant.

Read the earlier article

[dezert_fox]

Note: The earlier article posted here on Slashdot re: IE8 having 3 render modes (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/22/1837244) is worth reading. It describes fairly succinctly how/why the tag is broken (and it wasn't published by MS!). The solution provided by MS is actually a rather good idea.

Yawn

[Rinkhals]

Why is everybody surprised?

We have all experienced the Microsoft business model and by now we know how it works.

Repeat after me "EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH". Which part don't you understand?

They know it makes sense and you know it makes sense.

As for people saying that they will design websites to break IE8, I'm afraid that IE8 is gonna break your website.

Fact is that even now I'm having difficulty weaning people from IE6. Why should they use that other rubbish when IE6 is the manufacturer's choice. Well, okay, IE7, if you must insist.

The power of default

[version5]

So IE8 won't support ACID2, by which he means you won't be able to push a button and see a smiley face on this one page out of all the pages on the internet. You know what, no-one cares, and no-one should care. If IE8 supports a render mode that is more standards-compliant, why does it matter that you have to opt-in? Eventually, people will upgrade.

Håkon implies that having IE8 support ACID2 by default is actually a realistic option. I don't believe he is an idiot, so he must just be purposely lying. He must know that if Microsoft were to do that, the web would be broken for millions of people, so they would be forced to make IE8 an optional upgrade. And given the much-cited power of default, most people would stick with what they had. The people who might choose to upgrade would probably go with Firefox anyway, making an optional IE8 almost completely spurious that does nothing to increase the install base of standards-compliant web browsers. And why? Because Håkon believes that putting a checkbox next to "ACID2 support out of the box" matters somehow.

Re:The power of default

[ivan256]

HÃkon implies that having IE8 support ACID2 by default is actually a realistic option. I don't believe he is an idiot, so he must just be purposely lying.

Go back and read the first paragraph of your post again. If that's all the ACID tests were about, do you really think anybody would care about them? Have you considered the fact that perhaps it is you who doesn't know what you are talking about? You should consider that.

The ACID2 test is *not* about "seeing a smiley face on one page out of all the pages on the internet". It's about not having to develop a version of your complex website for every browser you wish to be able to display your page correctly, and it's about being able to use whichever browser you want to view the pages you want to visit. This tag defeats both of those purposes, as you will have to add special Microsoft stuff to your page to support IE8, and you will have to go back to IE8 or IE7 to view pages which choose to add this tag rather than become standards compliant.

Re:The power of default

[version5]

The ACID2 test is *not* about "seeing a smiley face on one page out of all the pages on the internet". It's about not having to develop a version of your complex website for every browser you wish to be able to display your page correctly, and it's about being able to use whichever browser you want to view the pages you want to visit.

I agree. Unfortunately, Håkon doesn't. From the article:

What will happen when you type http://webstandards.org/acid2 in your freshly installed IE 8? Will Acid2 be displayed correctly when you hit the test button?

This kind of narrow-minded legalism is what happens when people get so caught up with their hobby-horses that they forget what's important. IE8 would measurably increase the number of PCs that have a default standards-compliant browser, but we are told that this is bad for standards compliance. Instead, Microsoft should make IE8 render ACID2 correctly by default and make it an optional upgrade that virtually no-one will use.

So, they lied about it.

[Len]

Last month Microsoft said that they do pass the Acid2 test. Mozilla hasn't made that claim for Firefox 2.

Re:So, they lied about it.

[Your.Master]

No they didn't lie.

There's a regkey you can set to force IE8 mode. Also, it's Microsoft. They can have their build force standards mode. Hell, this meta tag might not have existed at the time.

I find it astonishing that I have to keep pointing this out.

Worst... Proposal... Ever!

[200_success]

Microsoft claims that the X-UA-Compatible flag is necessary on standards-compatible content to avoid breaking IE-specific content. I call BS.

For years, Microsoft has been telling everyone to put version-specific IE hacks in conditional comments, in case IE's behavior improves in future versions. Now that they are finally fixing IE, they spring this X-UA-Compatible "solution" on us, punishing those who have been producing standards-compliant content and rewarding the zombies who have been writing IE-specific code. If your site is standards-compliant, you have to do the extra work to tag it as such, and keep that crufty tag around for the foreseeable future!

If you sat down today and wrote a new standards-compliant browser, it would work just fine with almost all the content and web applications out there. Apple did this recently with Safari. Microsoft claims to have done this with IE 8. Safari didn't need any X-UA-Compatible flag. Why should IE 8 need one?

The only reason IE 8 would need the X-UA-Compatible flag is simply because it is IE 8. If their new browser identified itself as, say, "Microsoft Trident VI" instead, things would just work. Microsoft could still call it "Internet Explorer 8" for marketing purposes, but web developers would know that "MS Trident VI" means IE 8, just as "WebKit 4xx" means Safari 2 (or similar browsers) and Gecko means Firefox (or similar browsers).

Dear Microsoft, here's a sane solution for you:

1. Ditch the X-UA-Compatible flag; it's a stupid idea.
2. Continue supporting HTML conditional comments as you have been doing.
3. Fix the layout engine and the CSS parser at the same time, so that any existing IE-specific CSS hacks become irrelevant.
4. Add support for CSS conditional comments, to give web designers an escape route. Let's face it, CSS hacks are a reality, so we might as well have a tool to do it cleanly.
5. Send this as the User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Microsoft Trident VI; Windows NT x.y; ...; Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0; ...). Any server-side code doing browser sniffing, not seeing the "MSIE" string, should send a standards-compliant response. User-Agent strings have never really been logical anyway -- IE started this mess years ago by sending the "Mozilla" string, and Opera continued the trend by optionally sending the "MSIE" string -- so additional games in this area wouldn't do any more harm to the Web.
6. In JScript, navigator.appName should return 'Microsoft Trident', and navigator.userAgent should return the string above. Client-side scripts doing explicit browser sniffing, not seeing the "MSIE" string, would suppress their legacy IE hacks.
7. In JScript, document.all should evaluate to false (although expressions involving document.all can still behave as in older versions of IE). This approach worked for Mozilla, and it will work for Microsoft too.

As you see, it is possible to fix IE in a backward compatible way without introducing a X-UA-Compatible flag. The chances of Microsoft taking these steps is almost nil, since it places IE 8 on an even playing field with other standards-compliant browsers. That's why they are proposing X-UA-Compatible -- they can claim to support web standards while knowing that web developers will find it easier to muddle along than to use their stupid flag.

Re:Worst... Proposal... Ever!

[Anonymous Coward]

Send this as the User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Microsoft Trident VI;

If they are going to change the version string anyways, wouldn't it be ABOUT F*CKING TIME they stopped claiming to be an old version of Netscape (codename Mozilla), and actually put their own browser in the user agent?

Re:Worst... Proposal... Ever!

[MotherMGA]

I think this is a great solution to the problem at hand, however, I believe the problem at hand is being obfuscated and skewed by misinterpretation.

The problem: Historically, IE versions have had bugs that have cause rendering issues. This is further compounded by the fact that because of IE's wide adoption, companies have designed their internal applications around these bugs. When such companies are inevitably forced to upgrade, they are also forced to spend time and money to correct their applications that no longer work because IE has fixed the bugs that the company's application relied upon.

The solution: Fix IE and make it render compliantly (debatable here) and package the legacy IE rendering engines into the modern browser and allow render-engine hinting to allow a single header to tell IE that this application relies on quirks from an older browser. This allows a company to spend little development time to adopt the latest browser

Another great side-effect of this is that once the render-engine hinting is in place, Microsoft will BE ABLE to push updates to users without fear of breaking the Internet (like they do on every release). This will allow Microsoft to provide updates much more frequently.

Think of this as a migration path. The upgrade to IE 8 should be pretty painless because of this feature, and once its in place, it allows IE to be improved upon. Once IE becomes compliant (still debatable), they provide the EDGE keyword to indicate that the legacy mode should be disabled (as in, use the most current rendering engine), which means developers can set it and forget it.

Let me debunk one thing before I'm done. Microsoft isn't making a browser (or OS) specific tag. They are interpreting an optional header (which isn't part of HTML), which is being represented here as a tag. This is the least obtrusive way Microsoft could solve this problem and personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.

How bout wiping the slate clean?

[KookyMan]

I read somewhere, possibly on /. that W3C had just released its first working draft for HTML5. How about have a tag in HTML5 that signifies the page as HTML5 (Which I'm sure it will) and then /all/ browsers are supposed to handle it as written. No "strict" or "loose" rendering. No quirks. Just all pages written in HTML5 (or revised up to the new standard) are required to be written correctly, and rendered "strictly.". This will give Microsoft a way out of the hole they've made, while saving some face. Leave the quirky rendering engine in place for all HTML4/Earlier pages out on the net. In a few years, drop the other renderers from the software (say around IE11) and the rest and then it will be a much nicer playground for everyone. Kind of like the Vista idea of stop being backward compatible (plan for it) so we can clean out all the trash.

In 5 years, when the old engines are removed leaving just the one way to render a page, ancient stuff written to specification will still work, the only thing is pages that are effectively "broken" will need to be fixed in 5-10 years... if there are any still around.

Re:How bout wiping the slate clean?

[Your.Master]

http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2008/01/22/i-feel-happy-too.aspx#7203075

Doctype switches for new specs will not need the meta tag, according to the same buckaroo who wrote the blog post in TFA.

Lay off MS... this is a practical matter

[smitth1276]

You're Microsoft... Do you?

A) Make all of their existing "customers" update preexisting pages, which were designed to be viewed in IE6 or IE7, update their pages even though they may or may not have the resources to do so.

B) Ask developers working on NEW pages to simply insert a single meta tag at the top of their page, since they're already there anyway?

B is a lot less work for a lot less people. Microsoft is an enormous company with enormous responsibilities. It's easy to get pissy at them for what appears, superficially, to be a snubbing of standards, but the things they do can affect literally billions of people.

As an aside, are any of the web developers out there (who actually are the only ones with any real cause for concern) prepared to say that you never have to include code that is directed at a specific browser to ensure that that browser renders your page the way you want it to? What is the difference?

Msft == over promise and under deliver

[walterbyrd]

At least msft is consistant.

Another Way

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way to phrase the title of this thread might be: "will Microsoft be less evil without Bill Gates?" But there isn't much to discuss.

Does it really matter?

[WaHooCrazy7]

Does it really matter if a developer has to put a special tag in? I know that I will be including this tag on my sites, but even if not a developer will still be forced to write special code for MS in order to deal with the previous messes that they released. So in a way IE 8 really gets us nothing except that it starts the very very very very long phase out of all of these custom IE hacks, although I do not believe IE 8 will be very standards compliant considering microsofts track record. So in short, include the tag and still write the "special" code to deal with the crap microsoft handed us in their idea of a web browser, or convince everyone why they absoultly need to upgrade their browsers which is easier said than done.

Websites can phase out IE...

[Jumphard]

by refusing to accommodate a non-standards compliant browser.

As a web-dev I'm getting near the point of making webpages that look great in Firefox and other standards compliant browsers and only ensuring that the basic functionality works in IE. If things look like my dog's breakfast in IE, placing a handy link to www.getfirefox.com at the bottom of the page for viewers who want to view the site properly. Perhaps being even more vicious by writing javascript to blank out the entire page if the user is using IE.

The problem with going ahead with this Plan of Action is that it's then, me, the developer who looks like crap. It seems web developers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

a) Don't support IE and have your pages render improperly for a fair whack of your user base, which makes you look like a bad designer or...
b) Spend countless hours fixing, tweaking, and using the myriad of IE hacks to make pages look half decent.

Usually I don't have a problem with Microsoft - hey, if they make a craptastic OS: I don't have to buy it. But when it comes to being a web developer they cause me serious headaches! I think the web development community should be up in arms about IE8.

Registry Entry/Checkbox

[Joe U]

Hi, Microsoft:

How about including a registry entry or checkbox in the IE config to force standards mode as the default? There, problem solved.

Re:Registry Entry/Checkbox

[Bigon]

According to a comment on IEBlog there is already a registry entry for that

Re:Registry Entry/Checkbox

[Joe U]

According to a comment on IEBlog there is already a registry entry for that Well, then this whole article is really pointless.

MOD PARENT TOTALLY UP

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't know why microsoft doesn't just stop selling internet explorers in europe, wait no, in acid. no, wait wait, selling acid in europe; yeah, why doesn't microsoft just sell acid to europe, then internet explorers could roam free again like god intended when he wrote the constitution.

yeah

Standards

[Midnight Thunder]

I am getting to the point of relegating IE to the pile of: I'll do it when I'm bothered. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror are my primary test platforms. IE is left to the end, since I know I will have to fight with it. If Microsoft does any more crazy stuff, I will ensure I add 'note to IE8 users' and put the sort of text other sites have on Firefox and Safari usage, and then just not bother with more testing than I have to.

So stupid

[Chapter80]

I have seen the Acid2 smiley face, and no one's going to want that on their webpage, so what's the difference? Whoever came up with that test is stupid, because there's no way you are going to convince even 50% of the website owners to put a stupid happy face on their website.

Re:So stupid

[Chapter80]

(ok, somebody laugh!)

Re:So stupid

[eugene ts wong]

Eh, that went over my head. I thought that you were serious. Now that I know, it actually is kind of funny. :^)

Why do you care?

[Slash.Poop]

Why do you care?

I am getting so sick of reading this website and all the people railing day in and day out against Microsoft. Anything that involves Microsoft just gets slammed. Good, bad, or indifferent. (This article is a good example. Microsoft is moving toward what you said you wanted, having IE support more standards. What do we have? People not even caring, just hating.)

Reading this website for well over a year, you know what the common theme among you is? All of you say the following.....I use Linix, I use OSX, or I would never be caught dead using a Microsoft product. So I am left to ask again, why do you care? If you are never going to use Microsoft why would you rail against anything they do? Are you that bored? You are going to use OSX so why do you care about Vista? You are going to use FireFox so why do you care about IE? You are going to use Thunderbird and OpenOffice so why do you care about Office?

The stories that get the most posts either involve Apple or Microsoft. Apple is Jesus and Microsoft is Lucifer. There I summed up ever post for you. Now go do something else. Go find a life. Go explorer Apples latest service pack, Leopard. Go write a Linux app. Go outside. Stop ruining the credibility of this website by spewing your hate.

PS: Have you ever noticed that Microsoft fans are not bashing Apple ever chance they get. Can anyone really say that about Apple fans and Microsoft? Think about it.

Re:Why do you care?

[DaveCBio]

It's usually the smugness that comes with going against the mainstream. Kind of like people that are really into an indie band until they have a hit and then they just bitch about how the band sucks now because they sold out and went mainstream even if the music is still the same.

Re:Why do you care?

[mtmihai]

Why do you ask?

Re:Why do you care?

[Aussie]

Microsoft is moving toward what you said you wanted, having IE support more standards. Because this what they appear to be doing, not what they are really doing. The path of least resistance will still be creating non standards compliant pages that are tied to the Windows platform and that is what our complaints revolve around.

Why does this tag...

[Anonymous Coward]

make your pages suddenly stop rending in IE 5/6/7? IE 5/6/7 don't know that the tag is, and will ignore it.

You continue to write to the standards the way you are, and optionally include the new meta tag. IE 5/6/7 continue to render your page the way they're rendering them right now. If you ahve the tag, IE 8 will render it in it's fully standards compliant manner. Without the tag, IE 8 will render it like IE 7/6 depending on Doctype.

This isn't rocket science, this method means that all existing pages won't break under IE 8, and that all new pages can render properly in IE8 + without having to use hacks and css tricks.

Maybe a bad thing can be a good thing?

[QuantumFTL]

It seems to me that web browsers are poor tools for what we currently ask of them - online mail viewing, interactive AJAX applications, rich client stuff, etc. We need something better, something standard, and something ubiquitous.

There's a pain level to switching - which is why we haven't yet. But if the pain of not switching finally gets too high, maybe we will switch, and all be better off for it.

Re:Page specific tuning...How can it PASS the ACID

[Metasquares]

I'm not sure what you mean, but my post has nothing to do with the ACID test; it was a reply to the parent mentioning that certain pages broke in IE7 that worked in IE6. It was largely due to people exploiting weird IE6-specific CSS parsing bugs to create hacks, which were then fixed when IE7 rolled around, causing their pages to break.

Re:Amazing--it's very simple.

[brentonboy]

If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. Simple! IE8 should render pages like IE8 by default. Anyone whose page was poorly designed to begin with can "fix" their page by putting this tag in or sending the equivalent HTTP header:

What??

[ddoctor]

So... a CNET article PREDICTS that IE will not pass Acid2. Wow, what an insightful prediction. How is this news?

It's easy!

[vrmlguy]

Change IE8 to use this user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.4

Totally Unfair

[pembo13]

As it seems this is totally unfair to those who did things properly instead of the MS way.

If you coded to standards, you were punished due to the monopoly

If you hacked to get to work in IE? you spent several extra hours

If you coded to IE, you did so throwing away any engineering pride

Now, if you are already following standards, you now need to break those standards in the hopes of getting the rest of your work to be rendered according to standards. Just great

Re:Totally Unfair

[Shados]

No. The web developer really has nothing to do. If the -sysadmin- configure the web server to send a certain header, web pages will be rendered correctly without anything being done by the web developer. Problem solved. The metatag is just there for when you can't change the server configuration.

Re:Amazing--it's very simple.

[Bogtha]

That approach only satisfies one of the constraints. "It breaks until you hire somebody to fix it" is not backwards compatibility.

Tell 'em IE8 is broken

[ppentz]

Simply tell people IE8 is broken if it isn't rendering, and advise them to download and use a compliant alternative, like Firefox.

How about fixing IE6/7?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means they must go back and develop older codebases but then that is a one-time cost for them.

Then IE6 with DOCTYPE set to strict renders like strict. IE6 borked is the old intranet version and we don't need this stupid tag.

Why is that wrong?

Re:Amazing--it's very simple.

[brentonboy]

"It breaks until you hire somebody to fix it" is not backwards compatibility. "compatible" doesn't mean that it works instantly, by default, and without any extra effort. it should mean that it is possible to make it work without an excessive amount of effort.

i suppose you're right on some level. but i assume that there would also be an option in the browser itself to set how to render the page if it breaks. that would fill them both.

the point is that it can still be backwards compatible even with IE8 rendering as the default. otherwise, by your definitions, it's not "present compatible" which is even worse.

The "real world" result

[Anonymous Coward]

The "real world" result of this IE8 design stupidity isn't that a bunch of people who care about standards-compliance are going to add a tag/HTTP header to make IE8 render in standards-compliance mode (although some may, thinking they're being "pragmatic"), or that Microsoft is going to change course on this after all the hue and cry, but rather...

Web developers are going to continue designing for IE6.

Basically, if the default rendering mode of IE8 is going to continue to be the same as IE7 (which will basically be IE6, only not as broken), nobody's going to add this META tag. It'll be easier to stick with the status quo: You don't need to do anything new, and your site will continue to work with all those IE6 browsers out there.

Of course, standards-compliant browsers will remain screwed, but Microsoft will be covered.

+1

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Somebody give the man a +1 for me.

An alternative approach

[Anonymous Coward]

How about just a standard tag for an "render for" date.

    <meta render-for="2008-01-22"/>
    <meta render-for="always"/>

In other words, "This page worked on all the latest browsers (that I cared about) when i tested it on jan 22 2008." In this way one can avoid the aggravation of having to feel like they added custom code for Internet Explorer.

I don't know that this is a better technical solution, but it's probably more digestible politically.

Pointless

[psy]

The reason for doing this is microsoft dont want to break the majority of pages there.

The fact of the matter is those pages have been written to work in firefox with an IE hack added over the top.

All the developers need to do is remove the IE hack and use the firefox base and it will work with minimal effort.

Plus forcing people to actually fix it will push the direction back into 1 implementation of html rather than the multiple versions that developers need to currently make.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Anonymous Coward]

He just got back a few days ago actually!

Re:Amazing--it's very simple.

[KDR_11k]

However "it's broken until you hire someone to fix it" is not standards compatibility either.

WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIM

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, NOW you can pull that anti-MS rhetoric back out and ask: "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?"

Okay: WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?

Serious. Why?

Every product has bugs, but considering they disbanded the IE team, why can't we mock Microsoft (the institution) for being completely brain dead? They dropped the ball and are now asking everyone else on the Internet to help them to pick it up. In the meantime various volunteers (KDE, many Moz people) and other companies (Opera, Mozilla.org, Apple) have been working their asses off to help improve things.

It's said that people will be pissed at MS for breaking their web pages if they start being more strict and their pages break. Well I say that people should be pissed right now for MS being stupid and putting people in this position in the first place. It's not like MS has a lack of resources to fix things.

Don't Give it Up!

[AmigaMMC]

If Microsoft doesn't want to use standard HTML, CSS etc. let them, who cares?! The web developer community needs to smarten up and design sites only with standard coding and if IE8 can't display them properly people will switch to Firefox, Opera, etc. It really takes little to bend Microsoft to the will of the world, you just have to try. Luca

Uh Bias?

[WebmasterNeal]

It's hard to read the article considering it's coming from a person/company bringing IE before the European Union "for not supporting web standards" http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/192240 Håkon Wium Lie is a deutschbag

Maintenance problem, NOT a solution!

[kodeman]

What I don't get is why people even bothered with IE 6 "standards mode"?

Microsoft's documentation and documented quirks/workaround all over the web clearly laid out the case for using quirks mode for both IE 5 and 6 and waiting until at least IE 7 came out to implement any sort of "standards mode" rendering shift using the DOCTYPE switch.

Microsoft said quirks mode WOULD NOT CHANGE and that standards mode WOULD CHANGE with new browser versions. It was a NO BRAINER for any (competent) developer wanting their pages not to break with IE 7 or other future IE release to induce quirks mode (IE 5 rendering) in IE 6 using an HTML comment or XML processing instruction before the strict DOCTYPE and then using standards-compliant markup and CSS, with a separate compatibility stylesheet for fixing browser bugs targeted specifically to "lte IE 6" using conditional comments.

People having done this wouldn't have had to even touch the HTML again when/if a new IE browser version came out. The pages would render in standards-compliant mode for all current and future browsers that followed standards. The hacks/compatibility workarounds for non-standard IE issues would already have been dutifully contained and locked to the specific browser versions with the issues.

It's funny how it worked out that IE 7 suddenly started to render XHTML pages like this PROPERLY in standards mode, having fixed the XML processing instruction bug that triggered the IE 5/6 quirks mode for XHTML strict documents. HTML pages using the HTML comment before the DOCTYPE still render properly and in quirks mode in IE 7. All of this WITHOUT CHANGING ANYTHING.

There is absolutely no reason pages should have broken when IE 7 came out if developers were competent to begin with and coded defensively. I mean, come on, the information has been available since IE 6 came out and quirks mode rendering workarounds have been increasingly available throughout this time for use in your conditional-comments targeted stylesheets.

On another note: it is the very people at A List Apart who recommended this ignorant meta tag proposal to Microsoft, that were also responsible for teaching so many unsuspecting novices to standards-compliant web development to trigger and use IE 6 "standards mode" knowing full well that that mode was far from compliant and was subject to future breakage as the mode was updated with each future IE release (at least until IE caught up to modern standards-based rendering levels).

I mean, do you think their solution could possibly be well-conceived when their foresight is obviously so bad?

Come on, Microsoft! Open up a discussion on this issue before blindly taking the first potential solution that falls in your lap and forcing us web developers and customers whom are both yours and ours to deal with the potentially massive blowback!

Re:WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST

[Anonymous Coward]

> Okay: WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME?!?!?

> Serious. Why?

Because they had to be compatible with Netscape.

Some news...

[networkassault]

Must have been a slow news day.

Get some spine

[lpq]

' Microsoft's IE8 render modes have ... caused an uproar in the web development community. According to the scheme, authors must put Microsoft-specific tags into their pages in order for them to be rendered correctly.

Well the authors could decide to show some spine and "just say no" to bending over for Microsoft. They can instead tell customers to get a standards compliant browswer...Firefox maybe?

Re:Get some spine

[kodeman]

Yes. In fact, that is exactly what is happening at the moment. At least the vocal majority is in utter opposition. See the IE Blog.

Also:

• Eric Meyer's follow up post
• WaSP response
• Discussion which includes a disclaim of official endorsement by Andy Clarke, co-lead of WaSP

I am calling on the development community for solid alternative proposals:

Alternatives NOW!

Illegal substances

[larjon]

I guess the employees of Microsoft was taking a different kind of acid test when they came up with this.

NO !

[Anonymous Coward]

The single most trivial change required, the only change required, is that MS drop the IE brand name. I know, like that's going to happen when hell freezes over. The thing is, IE8 and IE9 etc etc are, even according to MS, a fundamental break from the shite that was IE5, IE5.5, IE6, IE7. If they produce a NEW name browser, end of problem. All those hacks that work in IEx will still work, conditional comments included. And the new "browser from microsoft" can follow standards like it wants to.
So, now the excitement commences ... your submissions for the name of the new MS browser ...

Start your engines ...

advice to all web developers

[Anonymous Coward]

strictly adhere to the standards by checking your
pages with the w3c.org validators and fix them
until there are no errors.

don't fix any problems when you are certain that
these problems arise exclusively from non-compliance
of browsers to the w3c standards.

This fixes my website :)

[Anonymous Coward]

My Website
Hello!

ROTFL

[Udo Schmitz]

Read here for the WebKit team's response

Followed your link, and this paragraph made me laugh:

"We Don't Really Need It

Finally, while we sympathize with the tough road that the IE team has to travel to achieve a high degree of standards compliance, we haven't really experienced the same problem. The IE team has mentioned severe negative feedback on the IE7 release, due to sites expecting standards behavior from most browsers, but IE6 bugs from IE.

But WebKit already has a high degree of standards compliance. And we are not in the enviable but tough position of being the most widely used browser. The fixes we do for standards compliance rarely cause widespread destruction, and when they do, it's often a sign that the standards themselves may need revision. We do not get complaints from web content authors about their sites breaking, on the contrary we get a lot of praise for each version of the engine handling web sites better."

Well, nicely put :-P

Microsoft is doing this all backwards

[Supergibbs]

While I don't think it should have taken this long, I applaud Microsoft for finally supporting standards and passing the ACID2 test. Regardless of the proprietary tag, they've made a rendering engine that follows standards. At the same time, because they have a strong majority of the browser market, they can't all of a sudden break thousands of pages. I strongly oppose implementing new, non-standard tags; especially to make your standards-compliant site render correctly. Why does Microsoft punish the good developers? They would get a lot more respect if the owned up and said:

"We messed up, from now on we're going to create a standard compliant browser exactly to spec. We know this means a lot of sites will need to be updated, but it's in the best interest of the web development community and consumers. During the transition, you can add <some proprietary tag> to force IE8 to render in IE6 or IE7 mode."

Make the non standards developers work for it.

Internal Applications

[200_success]

The problem: Historically, IE versions have had bugs that have cause rendering issues. This is further compounded by the fact that because of IE's wide adoption, companies have designed their internal applications around these bugs. When such companies are inevitably forced to upgrade, they are also forced to spend time and money to correct their applications that no longer work because IE has fixed the bugs that the company's application relied upon.

The companies with IE-specific internal applications aren't going to roll out IE 8 anyway. Hell, we know that they are still clinging to IE 6 because of compatibility concerns. Just fix IE 8 the way it should be fixed, and given enough time, those companies will realize that the world has moved on without them. Microsoft's only responsibility is to ensure that:

• Users who don't want to upgrade to IE 8 don't have to
• Dual-mode (W3C and IE) websites can continue to use existing IE-detection mechanisms (conditional comments, User-Agent sniffing, JavaScript sniffing)

Personally think its great because I will spend 2 minutes of development time in order to support IE8.

It's not just 2 minutes of development time. It's development time for developers everywhere to serve a stupid flag forevermore in the future (or until Microsoft drops the legacy mode support from IE x and the number of users still clinging to IE x-1 has dwindled to a negligible number) (which is practically forever).