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Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List
nickull writes "Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com. Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."
What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...
The worst thing on the internet is a site that only works in IE. I just ran across one the other day that displayed nothing but a blank screen in Firefox and Chrome. There are many more that have crazy formatting issues in anything but IE. So, this is a good way to force these sites to update from their 1997 crapfest to the standardized modern web.
So slashdot, what should it be?
Break standards and keep compatibility? Or break compatibility and be standards compliant?
Either way they'll be unpopular it appears. At least in the short-term.
throw new NoSignatureException();
If finally coming into compliance is what they are doing, then, Duh! By default the sites that are built for the not-compatible versions are going to be broken. I think it is wonderful. If Microsoft comes into compliance and renders web pages by the book (the W3C standard), then it is a great thing for all. Having broken sites is the price that companies pay for jumping on the bandwagon when they had the choice to do the right thing or not.
Consider broken sites a small price to pay going forward to gain real compatibility and a much better web. Less time spent developing around the broken browsers means more time spent building true content - maybe even more time on better security.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Now web developers will need to test two more assuredly incompatible browsers, IE8 standards mode and IE8 compatibility mode!
Microsoft's stance that fixing IE will break the web is counter intuitive propaganda. They broke the web when they failed to keep IE's standards compliance up to date, and since they strong-armed themselves to the top of the browser share pile, much of the web is built to satisfy their flawed implementation.
MS is giving that chunk of the web an incentive to fix itself... it's already broken.
If MS would approach this with some humility and logic, more people would understand that it's not the sites that are broken, it's the blue E.
``the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE.''
Which wouldn't be a Bad Thing if the sites were also standards compliant. However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade. Even today, the prevalent attitude seems to be that you "support" one or two browsers, instead of keeping to standards and having your site Just Work in every decent browser.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is just a simple case of The Left Hand Doesn't Know What The Right Hand Is Doing.
Seriously, in any organization of Microsoft's size, these type of things will happen.
I'll bet that the guys developing IE8 really want to make it 100% standards-complaint, but the web developers dudes didn't get the memo. (Or more sinisterly, there are forces in Redmond whose interests do not lie that way.)
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
No time wasting options = not a real poll
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
"Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'fixing the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work incorrectly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.
Depends on where you look in google. If you go to their more technical pages you'll find that they adhere pretty well to solid HTML5 practices. It's only the front page that is optimized to hell and back. You'll note that google's front page doesn't have any pretty layout in the code; it's gone through some variant on the 'crunch' routines to remove excess whitespace and newlines. Their other pages are much prettier/easier to read.
I'm pretty sure that the main front page is done that way in order to absolutely minimize the amount of data that gets sent over the connection. They drop every option or implied tag/attribute, don't use quotes on attribute values, etc, because they know that pretty much all browsers can still render what is a fairly simple web page. However every byte they reduce the file size by probably saves them thousands of dollars (random statistic pulled from nowhere) a month in bandwidth.
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web?
Not really, no.
Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?
Windows Update has been a freakin' Control Panel and Service in Windows for a decade now. Please update the rhetoric to the 21st century, thank you.
Yes, the web-based Windows Update still works. Yes, it requires IE. That's because IE is the only browser that ever implemented ActiveX. But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.) ActiveX was fairly extended in the correct manner prescribed by HTML. Is it a good technology? No. Does it violate the HTML standards? Also no. Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
Comment of the year
You have your answer there:
"It doesn't work right with Gmail, even in compatibility mode"
That means its doing user agent sniffing and going from that, and isn't made to go with a newer version... Compatibility mode is pretty much exactly IE7's rendering engine. So if it doesn't work, well...
Do we really want a fully standards compliant Microsoft Browser? How can the next wave of standards be developed then?
Yes, we do want a full compliant Microsoft browser? This will have absolutely no impact on the development of new web standards to extend what we already have.
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