Site Compatibility and IE8

Kelson writes "As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both. Most of the page focuses on IE8 Standards mode, but it also turns out that IE7 compatibility mode isn't quite the same as IE7 itself."

Comments

My favorite

[AKAImBatman]

This is actually a pretty good list and will allow me to encourage action on some standards-compliant bugs I know of in sites I work on. (e.g. Some programmers previously relied on getDocumentById searching "name" elements.) However, there is one bug in this list that has me both bemused and disgusted:

Object Detection

Object detection works great when used correctly. However some pages assume the existence of one feature based upon the presence of another, leading to problems when both features are not implemented in the same release.
if(window.postMessage) {
        window.addEventListener(
                "load",
                myHandler,
                false
        );
}

SOLUTION: Perform proper object-detection for each feature used.

if(window.addEventListener) {
        window.addEventListener(
                "load",
                myHandler,
                false
        );
}

Hmmm... maybe that's because Microsoft didn't implement the fucking standard correctly? The standard is more or less DEPENDENT on DOM2 events. (At the very least, I doubt anyone expected someone to implement the standard with a dysfunctional DOM.) That's why you can assume that you can use addEventListener to set a postMessage event receiver. But Microsoft didn't implement DOM2 events, despite helping develop the standard 10 years ago.

IE8 standards compliance is a joke. A sick joke played out by millions of unsuspecting users everywhere.

Re:Target a standard

[aurispector]

They had all the resources they needed to produce perfectly compliant browsers, so one must inevitably conclude that the incompatibilities were deliberate. If your average clueless Joe has trouble with anything but the bundled IE, there's big incentive not to change, right? It's not done 'til Firefox won't run!

It's quite ironic that MS's shenanigans are coming back to haunt them.

Re:Target a standard

[tecnico.hitos]

Somehow Flash isn't as fast to me.
I can barely watch a Flash animation in low Q mode at half Speed

I have a Athlon XP, 2 GB RAM.

Re:Don't get "Compatibility View"

[kestasjk]

Even Firefox has different rendering modes depending on what sort of site it's looking at. Most web-dev plugins for it will tell you whether it's rendering in Standards mode or Quirks mode.

It's more about pragmatism than sloppiness; they need to support new sites which need a correct implementation of standards, and they need to support the old sites used in corporate internets which are kludgy messes, that no-one would dare try and update.