Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Comments

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Unforunately, it's not that simple. Previous versions of IE were broken enough that standards-compliant HTML and CSS would not render properly. So if you wanted the majority of people to be able to actually use your site, you /had/ to be aware of - and often code around - IE stupidity, for all but the simplest of applications.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[wvmarle]

So true.
Call me a loser, but after setting up my website nicely with CSS defined columns, floats, etc - it didn't work in IE. It just displayed an empty page! While it worked fine in Mozilla, FF and Safari.
I recoded the site using tables for lay-out.
When I did that, it worked nicely in IE as well. And I really had the intention to move with the times.
It's a simple company site, partly static, partly dynamic - but using tables was the easiest way out for me, without having to learn even more new things. I've got better things to do with my time.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Red Flayer]

Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

I'm unsure of who you mean by "users" -- do you mean web developers, or end-viewers?

If you mean developers, then adhering to standards and "looking good" are the same thing -- since more and more end-viewers use browsers other than IE. Developers should care about adhering to standards because not doing so may alienate some of their (or their employers') potential customers.

If you meant end-viewer, they aren't really germane to the discussion, since what we're discussing is in the blackbox to them. All they will understand is that some sites seem "broken"... not understanding that it's because they are using a non-compliant browser. Again this goes back to the developers, since it is their duty to make sure their website looks good (or even is viewable) by the most number of people.

Please note I'm generalizing here, I'm sure there are exceptions.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[ptlis]

The user-agent string is not a reliable indicator of which user-agent is being used (as counter-intuitive as this seems), a much better methodology (that several other people have already mentioned) is to use IE conditional comments to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of Internet Explorer after the main stylesheet to override only the specific rules required to get that version of internet explorer to display the content as expected.

This has several advantages:

• the ability to have different rules to handle bugs in specific versions of IE.
• if future versions are released then they'll ignore the stylesheets targeted at older versions (so if IE8 is as good as it's been made out to be your documents should render correctly without any additional work)...
• and if there are still some some small bugs then IE8 can itself get a stylesheet designed to fix just these.
• unlike methods that rely on the UA string, it is guaranteed only to be applied by the browser you specify (because browsers other than IE see the conditional comments as just plain old HTML comments (relying on the UA string would mean that UAs pretending to be IE would not be incorrectly served the IE hack filled stylesheet)

This is the methodology I prefer to follow with the sites that I develop, and after the experiences I had testing compatibility and fixing various layout problems that remained in IE7 I can say that it definitely pays off. Personally I'm hoping that IE8 will be close enough that I can finally dump IE conditional comments entirely once the older versions have disappeared and relegate it to the pile of no-longer relevant skills alongside the ability to generate pixel perfect layouts using tables & invisible spacer gifs and the ability to consistently beat almost anyone at Perfect Dark multiplayer.