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.

Comments

Huge assumption in the title

[Tumbleweed]

Let's make one thing clear - IE8 may be in standards-compliant MODE by default, but whether it's *standards-compliant* has yet to be proven. What Microsoft HAS proven (repeatedly) is that it considers compliance with standards to be a relative term. Only time will tell. I sure hope that they actually accomplish it this time; I'm tired.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Your.Master]

Compliance to standards is a relative term. No browser exists today that is completely compliant. What we can say is that this one appears to be more compliant than before -- it renders ACID2 at the very least (and probably does right everything IE7 did right).

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Phroggy]

What Microsoft HAS proven (repeatedly) is that it considers compliance with standards to be a relative term. So do all other browser makers. The various standards involved are non-trivial to implement, and as another poster commented, nobody has implemented all of them.

Just because a browser passes Acid2 doesn't mean it's "standards-compliant". It means it complies with the specific parts of the standards that Acid2 tests for, which is only a few things that most browsers (at the time Acid2 was created) got wrong.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[pembo13]

More standard than IE7 isn't really a high bar to aim for though.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Anonymous Coward]

> Compliance to standards is a relative term.

No, this statement is incorrect.

> No browser exists today that is completely compliant.

That is true. But it has no connection with the last statement.

I understand your point, and it's well taken, but you are introducing a tautology. Standards compliance is absolute, by _definition_.
Some attempts to comply with written standards may fail, and as such are not compliant. It may well be true that no browsers exist that are standards compliant, as the standards are written. However, please don't go waving around poisonous ideas like "standards compliance is a relative term".
Americans seem to have adopted a very lax relativism of late, a kind of fuzzy belief that everything is subjective. Some things are not. Some things are just facts that must be heeded. The definition is not up for negotiation, that's what _makes_ it a standard.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Craig Davison]

This is good news. The important thing is that MS is now saying they're willing to sacrifice backwards compatibility in IE. They have no reason not to follow the standards now (barring bugs or technical limitations).

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Your.Master]

I'm not an American (but I will claim that many, many things ARE subjective). But I am a native speaker of English and as such dispute the definition of standards compliance. I tried dictionary.com but it doesn't seem to address whether compliance is an absolute term or not. Let me draw an analogy:

We have Aristotelian conceptions of Gravity.
We have Newtonian conceptions of Gravity.
We have Relativistic conceptions of Gravity.

Would you agree that a physical theory being "correct" is equivalent to a physical theory being "standards compliant" where the standard is reality?

If so, then I think if we followed your your view, none of these models are correct, and that's that. In my view, all of them are unequally correct, or in other words, unequally incorrect. Every one of them is more correct than "things fly away from massive objects due to gravity". I would tend to go so far to say as Newtonian and Relativistic interpretations are both, in fact, correct; but decline to say either is 100% correct.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Of course, you have an easy out if you claim that correct is not like compliance with the reality standard. But in that case I'd like to know why you disagree with that.

But if you accept that correct & compliance with reality are the same, and still disagree with me, then we've devolved into an argument of semantics. "I believe this word means this". "No, this word means THAT". Ultimately not entirely useful.

And definitions are always, ALWAYS up for negotiation, because that's how natural language works :). English doesn't even have a standards body. French has one, but every speaker is to some degree non-compliant.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Merusdraconis]

That was true five years ago, but no longer. With the amount of competitive alternate browsers out there, and the new rise of the iMac, the standard is the W3C. While most web developers will put in extra effort to work around IE's bugs, they're starting from W3C-standard webpages and kludging in IE support, not (as it worked years ago) building pages that worked in IE first then trying to make them work on Netscape later if at all.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[mysticgoat]

Would you agree that a physical theory being "correct" is equivalent to a physical theory being "standards compliant" where the standard is reality?

No, I don't agree with that stipulation.

Reality is in its essence unknowable. Theories are models of reality that are simpler, and are based on a multitude of assumptions. And many of those assumptions go unstated. For instance, I am aware of no theory of gravity that takes into account the color of the objects being described, yet there is no scientific basis on which we can exclude color (or smell, or taste) from gravitational considerations. We do so because at this moment in history it seems silly to include it, but that is a literary arts judgment, not a scientific judgment. If you want to get your pet theory on Electric Pulse Gravity published, you'd do well to heed the literary aspects, but don't mistake them for the science.

A standard, however, is the formal statement of a group's conceptualization about a process, such as how a distance shall be measured, or how a web page shall be rendered. A standard has nothing to do with reality. It is all in your head (and the heads of everyone else who familiarizes themself with the standard). Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard). Perhaps more to the point, it is possible for someone to completely learn a standard, including any of its weaknesses like internal contradictions or ambiguities. However it is impossible for anyone to completely learn reality, or learn all there is to know about any theory of reality.

In this sense, Euclidean geometry is a standard. You can do a lot of neat things with it, and you can spend lots of time exploring places where it is still ambiguous (things not yet proven). But you can't violate its established rules and still claim it is Euclidean geometry. You can replace those rules with other rules, but then you have a non-Euclidean geometry, like spherical geometry as one instance.

It is possible for a web browser to be standards compliant in the absolute sense. It is also reasonable to describe the relative compliance of non-compliant browsers. And since in nearly every case the context will make it clear as to whether the meaning is absolute or relative, there is no rarely any need to specify that. Unless, of course, one is pushing a hidden agenda, where the intent of talking about the subject is to create as much heat and smoke as possible while putting out no light.

There's probably a really succinct way of saying all the above, but I left my Zen Pocket Companion at work.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[statusbar]

With respect to the http 1.1 standard, it _is_ relative...

From the standard:

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [34].

When the people writing the standards write standards with the words "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT" or "RECOMMENDED" or "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" you now have a standard which can have many different faces, or compliance levels. IMHO, this is poor standards writing. They MUST make the specs using the terms "MUST" and "MUST NOT" and bump the version number. Then you can easily have automated unit tests which show absolute compliance. But we don't, and must rely on what developers "THINK" or "MAY NOT THINK" is correct about the spec.

--jeffk++

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[cp.tar]

More standard than IE7 isn't really a high bar to aim for though.

It is much higher than "more standard than IE6".

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[FrangoAssado]

Would you agree that a physical theory being "correct" is equivalent to a physical theory being "standards compliant" where the standard is reality?

Oh, come on.

The web "standards" specify what exactly is required for an "agent" to comply (for example, in the CSS 2.1, the section 3 defines the conformance requirements).

So, I might agree that right and wrong may not be absolute for theories explaining reality (and I do!). But being compliant to a standard that specifically tells you that is needed to comply *is* absolute.

BTW, thanks for the link. I'm an Asimov fan, and I hadn't seen that yet.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Your.Master]

[quote]yet there is no scientific basis on which we can exclude color (or smell, or taste) from gravitational considerations.[/quote]

Sure there are. For instance, parsimony. Repeated experimentation holds that these properties are pretty much unrelated to gravity*. Besides, other models that appear consistent seem to adequately explain colour and smell and taste in ways that are incompatible by virtue scale with consistent gravitational theory.

Anyway, I recognize and respect your distinction here, although I do think it's hypothetically possible to come up with a model for reality accurate in every respect, we can just never truly comprehensively know that we have found the answer. That's neither provable nor disprovable, and thus, neither here nor there.

But I agree that context makes things clear pretty much always. If you look at the original context of my statement, he first used compliance as an absolute term, then declared that Microsoft viewed it as relative. I argue that the relative interpretation is quite valid. As for the hidden agenda, I don't think any of us (you, me, the guy I originally responded to, the Anonymous Coward in between) was pushing any hidden agenda, so I don't know where that came from.

I apologize if I looked like I was pedantically claiming that the absolute interpretation was invalid and retract any implication thereof. From my perspective, the person I responded to was saying that the relative interpretation was invalid, and the guy who responded to me agreed with absolutism-only.

* pigments for colours are slightly different composition, smells are different aromatic molecules, taste from that and other factors; all of which can reflect subtle molecular differences that lead to different mass per molecule which can in turn lead to different gravitational forces. Let's not analyse that one too deeply :).

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Your.Master]

I had to draw an analogy to something else with gradations of correctness. Physical theory was the only one to pop to mind. I don't really see a distinction just because we don't know the total rules to comply to reality (that's kind of the point). But you do, so okay.

You're welcome for the link.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ignoring some of the vague language of standards -- like "MUST, SHOULD, MAY, OPTIONAL", etc, as another poster clarified -- there is another reason why standards-compliance is subjective.

If you define a standard as a particular chunk of language, it is possible to create something which is technically compatible with the language, but not with any existing implementation of it. It is possible that this is because the existing implementations followed the spirit of that language, and you followed the letter of it. See any DJB program for examples of this.

If you define a standard as a particular reference implementation or validator (hopefully accompanied with a chunk of language), it is also possible for there to be bugs in that implementation, which must therefore be reflected in all competing implementations, but were absolutely not the intent. See the Windows APIs -- particularly their backwards-compatibility hacks -- for an example of this.

In other words, it is possible that either the language or the implementation will not adequately describe what was intended. In such cases, it is possible to have degrees of compliance -- all of which are technically compliant.

I would argue that to minimize this, it would be helpful to have all three -- a spec (or at least a design document), a reference implementation, and a validator (which could also be used as functional tests while developing the actual implementation). Even so, it's not going to be perfect.

That said, it is usually very clear when something is not compliant to standards, and there should not be degrees of that. Many people seem to think there are, but that only leads to the mess of hacks that is the Quirks Mode of most browsers today.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[the cheong]

I think there's a misunderstanding here.

When he says "standards compliance is [not] a relative term", he's not saying that a browser must _either_ be compliant or not. (He's _not_ saying that compliance is a binary state, which is what you're arguing against.) Rather, he's arguing that there exists a standard to which everyone should comply: an _absolute_ standard. Of course, all of the browsers have some imperfection, but some browsers take these imperfections as "bugs", recognizing that they are not fully conforming to the standard, while other browsers take these imperfections as a choice (i.e. taking it as their own _relative_ standard).

There are people here who argue that standards are "relative"--that everyone is allowed to have their own standards because no one can speak for the masses about what is right and what is wrong. However, the _point_ of making standards is so that we have an absolute goal that everyone may work toward, in uniform. You can't let everyone have their own standards, and say that some standard exists.

I don't mean to troll. I just don't think we're all on the same page about what "relative" means.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[strikethree]

There is a world of difference between not fully implementing a standard and doing something against the standard.

strike

Or perhaps...

[dedazo]

They just thought it was the best thing to do. After all, they're going to be breaking a lot of intranet crap, which won't make them lots of fans.

But that doesn't get the juices flowing as effectively as the "they did it because I think they're scared of the EU" editorial byline. Must have those ad impressions.

fsvo

[Nimey]

For small values of "compliant". I'll lay odds that it will still be less compliant than Gecko, KHTML, or Opera.

And we'll still have retarded webmonkeys designing for IE instead of standards, especially if MS gets it really wrong again.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[owlnation]

I'd like to agree with you. Unfortunately, I am occasionally forced to use IE through some lousy developers use of ActiveX or mediaplayer drm.

The day that web developers all reach a "standard" where they refuse to implement these things will be a joyful day for humanity. They all have the power to do that now, but it seems that some developers are not at the same standard as the rest.

Put it all on Silverlight!?!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I wonder if they're serious. Will they really be standards compliant enough so that I don't have to hack around IE8's deficiencies? Will this still be true for IE9? It's possible. Will this include SVG and XHTML and CSS3? What about XUL and HTML 5?

If all of the above work in the next couple of version of IE, do you know what that would indicate to me? That would indicate that Microsoft is betting on Silverlight to lock in users in the next 5 years... because they've pretty much convinced me they will never compete based upon features and the merits of their software, rather than trying to make it as hard as possible for users to switch to anything else.

Re:Put it all on Silverlight!?!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There are many web technologies, but there isn't a single browser that fully supports all of the standards you listed. I wish there was. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.

No, here is no browser that supports all of those completely. Some of the specifications are still in draft form for some of those technologies. So far, however, Firefox, Safari, Konquerer, and Opera all have at least some support for every one of the specifications I mentioned. Explorer has some support for some of them, but is behind on all of them compared to every other browser.

The difference is which browser teams are committed to implementing standards going forward and advancing the Web technologies as a real goal and which are interested in doing as little to make the Web a more powerful platform as possible while not incurring serious legal problems. I submit that if Microsoft is really serious about implementing the standards they will have at least some support for all of these Web technologies in IE 8, enough so that it shows they are committed to keeping current with Web technologies instead of freezing the Web at a technological level it was at 8 years ago and making sure it is never useful enough so that people can use Windows or some other platform.

Re:Hmmmm

[garett_spencley]

Competition is good. If Microsoft actually goes and creates a superior product then IE users get a better browser which forces Firefox to either "up it's game" (giving FF users an even better browser) or remain the same while everyone switches back to IE because it's superior.

Either way everyone gets a better browser. Win-win.

Re:Hmmmm

[eebra82]

I think a lot of people use Firefox because it is so easy to modify to your needs. IE can be configured, but not even remotely close to what FF can do with the help of plug-ins and extensions.

Also, I would say that most people who use Firefox are experienced users. Firefox cannot grow beyond this market simply because my inexperienced father is happy with what comes bundled with the computer. I hope you understand that analogy. Most people simply don't see the difference, nor do they care.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[mike_sucks]

You're not forced to use IE by those people - you choose to. In doing so, you are rewarding them for being crap.

What you should be doing is refusing to use them. Switch bank, don't use the service, or whatever - but make sure you write them an email or letter explaining why.

/mike

Wouldn't it be funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

if IE8's default standards mode was directly comparable to firefox, safari, etc. And then, get this, IE8 introduces a new mode that is 100% standards-compliant, better than any other browser on the market. And then... oh get this, get this: then you have to add a meta tag to access the better-than-other-standards-browsers mode!

Oh, I can just see it now. Irony at its best.

missing the point

[BPPG]

I much prefer firefox to ie. Hell, I've been into using kazehakase. And lynx comes in handy when I'm unable to run Xorg. But I would be glad to see microsoft finally bringing ie up to standards. It's not about which browser is better. People will use whatever browser they want. The important thing is that if such a widely used browser is up to standards, and if more people starts using, we can actually put those standard to use. If this encourages Mozilla and Opera to meet the standards as well, all the better. The thing is the content! Web developers will less and less have to plan for browsers quirks and contingencies, and focus more on content that everyone will be able to use and view online. So instead of five or six implementations, we can mostly just worry about one.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[Firehed]

Which, in actual terms, means that people code to Firefox just as they code to IE. It just so happens that coding your page to look right in Firefox is a helluva lot closer to the standard (if not it exactly) than when you do the same in IE.

I think some people may be doing tremendously over-complicated things with CSS and page elements though. There are only two things that I generally need to implement a (rather trivial) workaround for when implementing designs - transparent .png files, and IE's utter failure at centering elements with #blockid { margin: 0 auto; }. Maybe my implementations aren't complicated enough. Maybe other people are trying to do unusual things. Maybe I'm willing to give a virtual middle finger to IE users and give them square corners and simplify my life with the -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius half-implemented properties (I think the final border-radius property set is part of CSS3, and we'll be lucky to have most of CSS2 implemented by the time IE8 comes out - in any case, this is a style issue and not specific to IE). But in all seriousness, IE seems to be giving me a lot fewer headaches than it once used to. Maybe it's just dumb luck.

Re:2008 - the end of Slashdot???

[Vexorian]

Microsoft is attempting to become more open source friendly

No, it isn't.

Re:Booga booga

[FishWithAHammer]

That won't really help for the vast majority of users.

Re:EPIC WIN

[yakumo.unr]

Some places will always be far behind, but this news means there should be a brighter future, instead of endlessly delving further and further into a barrel of hideous hackery.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[satoshi1]

You say this, but would you do this? It is often easier to just put up with the browser bullshit instead of switching banks or finding a new service provider. I can't very well switch schools because my university doesn't support Opera for it's student portal, can I?

Developers & the half-life of accumulated cont

[weston]

Developers, developers, developers, right?

I think Microsoft has finally genuinely started to realize a very simple fact:

Client-side web developers hate them.

And it's probably the one thing MS has thoroughly earned with all the IE bullsh*t over the last 10 years.

This is a really great gesture, it's a good start if they want to allay any of that and gain back trust. But honestly, nobody gets over 10 years of being treated like crap overnight, and the half-life of contempt isn't short.

Personally, I'd like to offer my congratulations to the IE Product management team, and let them know that in time, I'll probably only wish debilitating terminal illness on them, rather than painful and extended death by torture.

They also said Windows NT was POSIX compliant.

[weston]

It's true, and if they can live up to the claim, I think that's great.

However, this is Microsoft. Their behavior in the past has shown they're not above:

(1) hard-coding stuff to make test cases work
(2) bending definitions to claim compliance.
(3) announcing out-and-out vapor to intimidate competition

It's also good to remember they've never before delivered anything like what they're claiming to have.

If I were laying money on an outcome, it would be that IE 8 will continue to lag annoyingly behind the alternatives.

Re:They also said Windows NT was POSIX compliant.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

However, this is Microsoft. Their behavior in the past has shown they're not above:

(1) hard-coding stuff to make test cases work

Do you have an example of this?

It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that I'm curious.

Re:They also said Windows NT was POSIX compliant.

[Paladin128]

I'm sorry, but other than geeks, who switched from IE because it wasn't standards compliant? I convinced many people to switch to Firefox for three reasons:

1) better security
2) better UI
3) plugins

That's it. Anyone who tells you people don't use IE because it's not standards compliant are idiots. Every web developer makes sure their pages work with IE, no matter how much extra work it takes.

Re:Hmmmm

[Your.Master]

You just totally missed his point. If, hypothetically, IE8 is in some way better than Firefox on Windows, Firefox will have adapt to compete. This will help Firefox on Ubuntu, because Firefox is competing with IE in the marketplace, even if it is not competing on your OS of choice.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[Khuffie]

Not sure about your part of the world, but where I live, quitting a job due to having to use IE for a payroll site is...stupid. Choice of employment is not up to the individual. If it were, I'd be "that-guy-that-sits-on-his-ass-playing-videogames-and-getting-paid-millions".

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[satoshi1]

Seems like an awful big hassle just to make a point about a web browser.

What's taking soo long?

[kjzk]

IE has made web development a living hell for me and I despise Microsoft for it. If everyone used Firefox my life would be 100 times easier!

Re:It's a trap!

[codemachine]

The trap is Silverlight. The standards compliant web is being extended with Silverlight, and a number of companies are already buying into it.

IE becomes the browser that can best view all the old broken IE-only HTML, all the compliant HTML, and all of the Silverlight pages that "enhance" the web. All of the other browsers will only render standard HTML well.

Sure Mozilla renders XUL, but Silverlight probably has more adoption than XUL already. Too bad someone didn't come up with a really friendly IDE to XUL early on in Mozilla's lifetime, since that is one thing MS tends to do well that drives adoption of their languages and tools. Developers, developers, developers!