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IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx
Firefox 2 is one of the most standards compliant browsers around. What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox? Check out the link I provided to webdevout's information on browser standards support before you reply...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They've said it already passes Acid2.
Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:
That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.
In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).
I disagree. At my last employer I used OmniWeb for a while (a very niche browser). Most of the Web UI developers used Firefox, but a couple used Konquerer. A few used Safari. A few used Camino. A few used Opera. Regardless of what you used, when you found a bug, you tested it with a couple of other browsers and if the remote Windows box was available (or you had an emulator running), you tested it on multiple browsers and multiple platforms.
The upshot of all of this was, when a bug was listed, it was pretty easy to see which bugs were specific to a given browser. Bugs that appeared in some version of IE, but in no other browser at all, were by far the most common occurrence. Realistically our approach boiled down to, "write to standards; then hack for IE. " Make no mistake, we did not code for some other browser then try to make it work on every one, because that was not needed for the most part. We were programmatically generating Web pages and interfaces from XML data and a couple of databases. For the vast majority of the time, all browsers but IE were close enough to the standards we used (HTML3, CSS2, XHTML) so that there were no discrepancies when tested.
You must not have read the press release!
"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue"They aren't putting their neck on the line... it's already there. :)
The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."
If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan, all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag
into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.Just for fun I tried Acid3 with a couple browsers (all MacOS 10.4.11):
Firefox3 nightly from March 3rd: 66/100. (Second closest to the reference rendering.)
Safari 3.0.4: 39/100.
Opera 9.26: 46/100. (Looked the least like the reference rendering though.)
Webkit nightly from March 4th: 87/100. (It also looked the closest to the reference rendering.)
Have you ever tried implementing something described in an RFC ?
When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.
The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.
Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.