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IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise?
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting:
"In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
The icon should be different. Their meaning makes some sense, but the purpose of the icon would be clearer if they added a question mark to the "broken page" (so the icon would convey "is the page broken?")
Considering IE's pattern of "improving" standards compliance over the last decade, a "more compliant" IE8 wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. MICROS~1 seems to think that fixing support for one thing and breaking support for 50 others is an improvement. It isn't. Even IE8's true "standards mode" is just as non-compliant as IE 7, 6, and 5.5. The only thing that has changed over all these revisions is the nature of the rendering errors. One version might treat a certain block element as inline, while the next fixes that issue only to draw inline borders incorrectly. All they do is change the errors, never fix them.
Anyone who thinks IE standards support has improved from IE7 to IE8 is sadly mistaken, and while we'd all rather have a truly compliant IE, it just isn't going to happen. I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but I'd rather have one broken web browser to develop hacks for than 4.
The article only says that INTRANET pages are not shown in standards-compliant mode by default.
Yeah the article is too harsh on this point, but...
Furthermore, web standards are discriminated against in IE8 by the icon that appears next to standards-compliant web pages
This is just terrible. This sounds like Ballmer came down there personally and mandated this. On the other hand...
First, I suggest that IE8 not introduce version targeting which only perpetuates the problem of non-compliant pages. Instead, IE8 should respect the established conventions which don't need manual switching between modes.
One of the things Microsoft does very well is maintain backwards compatibility. This is of tremendous value to enterprise customers. The least evil way to do this is with rendering modes. You can argue that standards should be the default, but to suggest that Microsoft should stab its most profitable userbase in the back and completely break backwards compatibility just to altruistically further the state of web standards compatibility is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I wish it would happen, but it would be a pretty stupid move.
It has improved. The difference between 6 and 7 wasn't too great, basically just bugfixes and additional selectors, but there are significant improvements in Internet Explorer 8, for instance CSS tables. Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test now, where 6 and 7 were miles off. While it's not a conformance test, it does give a good indication of how far they've come, and it's a result of additional support, not merely "rearranging bugs" as you seem to think (which would actually be far more work than just doing things properly).
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha