So the big news this week besides disappearing polar icecaps and multi-billion dollar stock market losses is that Internet Explorer 8 is going to be web standards compliant.
Let me say that again.
Internet Explorer 8 is going to be web standards compliant.
(Hmmm… maybe all the ice is going to hell so it can start freezing over?)
So what does this means? Will web developers be finally getting their wish and have standards compliant browsers from all the top browser manufacturers making web development easier, cheaper and faster?
Yes.. and .. uhm.. well.. maybe… not.
Microsoft are proposing that developers will be able to use all the great new web standards goodness of IE8 by adding a meta declaration to their files to tell IE8 they are using standards compliant code. Standards compliance will be opt-in. It will not be the default behaviour.
It seems that all those years at the top of the browser market share charts are now coming back to haunt the IE development team. They are now having to deal with the problems that the previous generations of IE have been giving web developers and designers for years. Ironically enough - they are faced with the task of having to maintain these problems.
But why would Microsoft want to maintain their buggy rendering engines for generations of IE to come? Because they sat on the same version (IE6) for five years. This resulted in masses of web pages, not to mention multi-million dollar corporate intranets that rely on these rendering bugs to deliver content to their users in a usable format. It’s all a matter of accessibility.
Microsoft are planning on distributing the IE6, IE7 and IE8 rendering engines within IE8. Developers will be able to declare what version of IE they want IE8 to render with. If developers don’t declare what version of IE they want to render with then IE will default to IE7.
All the other browser developers have been weighing in with their responses to this dilemma that Microsoft is facing and how the IE development team are proposing to deal with it;
Mozilla: META HTTP-EQUIV=”X-BALL-CHAIN” and Slipping The Ball And Chain
Webkit: Versioning, Compatibility and Standards
Opera: The Internet Explorer lock-in
For those with limited time or patience (quite frankly I don’t blame anyone for getting tired of this game that Microsoft started. It is really starting to get tedious) Ars Technica have written a concise overview of the whole situation and the solution that Microsoft has proposed.
Looking at the responses the aforementioned blogs are getting it is clear that a large majority of the web development community is displeased with the direction Microsoft has decided to take on this issue. It will be interesting to see if the IE development team respond to this feedback with another direction, or if they will stay the course on this one and see it through to the end.
Article graphic by Alan Foreman.
