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

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Phroggy]

I understand your point, and it's well taken, but you are introducing a tautology. Standards compliance is absolute, by _definition_. I take your point as well, but I want to interject that this entirely depends on what the standards are. Can you build a word processor that is 100% compliant with Microsoft's OOXML standard? Not really, in any meaningful sense, because the standard is incomplete and refers to behavior that isn't described as part of the standard (that's a large part of what all the OOXML vs ODF fuss was about). Can you build an IRC client that is completely standards-compliant? No, because the RFCs that describe how IRC works are incomplete, inconsistent, contain errors, and aren't strictly adhered to by any popular implementation.

In the case of HTML/XHTML and CSS, there's been quite a bit more effort invested into making sure the standards are properly documented and are internally consistent, but these standards are constantly evolving. Is it enough to support HTML 4.01 and CSS 2, or must you support HTML 5 and CSS 3? Do de-facto standards count? Remember that XMLHttpRequest (the basis of AJAX) is mostly a de-facto standard; the W3C has published a working draft of a specification for it.

Standards compliance isn't always as cut-and-dry as you make it sound.