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Microsoft.com Makes IE8 Incompatibility List

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the my-head-just-asplodered dept.

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."

10 of 358 comments (clear)

  1. Options by Anonymous+Showered · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What if we could just define which rendering engine to use in pages, e.g. IE7 or IE8 in a meta tag...

    1. Re:Options by should_be_linear · · Score: 5, Insightful

      or, perhaps, fixing those pages comes to mind...

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    2. Re:Options by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Insightful
      the IE7 standards

      Isn't that a contradiction in terms? The whole problem with IE7 is, it's not standards compliant.

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    3. Re:Options by Tweenk · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So what should I use?? "if IE" comments are the cleanest solution for IE woes. Using them you can make your sites both standards compliant AND hack-free.

      "Conditional comments" are perfect for linking to an additional style sheet that makes the site look decent in IE. They are the simplest and most reliable method of serving CSS/Javascript fixes, and they are W3C complaint (see this site: www.baltchem.eu - it uses those tags and is still valid XHTML 1.0 Strict).

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    4. Re:Options by tuxgeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have a better idea
      Let M$ build a browser that is W3C compliant.
      Then all the webmasters out there can make their sites W3C compliant.

      Now, see how easy that was?
      Complying with standards, what a concept

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      "Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
    5. Re:Options by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A non standards-compliant web page isn't hard to write. If goobers would stop writing their web pages to impress people with their 133t sk1LLz (Yahoo news comes to mind) and make them clean and standards-compliant in the first place, there wouldn't be these issues.

      If your site isn't compliant in the first place, you have no right to bitch about "working for free". If I screw up a project at work, I have to redo it. And if your site isn't compliant in the first place, you screwed up.

      Suck it up and fix it. Next time, do it right.

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  2. Breaking IE-specific sites is a GOOD thing by kbrasee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Rock and a Hard Place by Toreo+asesino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Rock and a Hard Place by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One of the two will make them unpopular in the long term.

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  4. Thank you, Microsoft! by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Microsoft had two choices:
    1. Continue rendering sites in the same broken way as previous versions of IE, making life a real pain for web developers.
    2. Render sites properly, making things better in the long run, but taking a public relations hit in the process.

    Amazingly, they chose the second option. Those of us who understand why this is important should be applauding right now.