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159 Comments
- central183, on 01/25/2008, -3/+77This image basically sums it up for me: http://media.arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-s ...
- aussieNickuss, on 01/25/2008, -8/+57"Microsoft plans for Internet Explorer 8 to be the most standards-compliant browser it has ever shipped."
They won't have to try very hard. I wish MS would just use gecko or webkit and spend more time developing their other software that actually makes them money. - nullcodes, on 01/25/2008, -6/+34Microsoft is overly obsessed with backward compatibility. People should not have marked their pages as standards compliant if they weren't. Their pages would have appeared broken in other browsers. So they should fix their pages anyway. Non compliance in standards mode was a bug, and bugs need to be fixed. You don't let bugs become features.
Microsoft needs to seriously re-evaluate their idea. - billread, on 01/25/2008, -17/+44The idea of sticking an MS only tag on a standards compliant web page just so it will do what it is supposed to do is absurdity. Why should developers help MS instead of the other way around?
- jejones, on 01/25/2008, -3/+24It shouldn't be necessary to add a non-standard tag to say you want the browser to conform to the standard.
- Cheesecrunch, on 01/25/2008, -4/+25"a meta tag - a ***** meta tag!"
I haven't laughed that hard for days - Angostura, on 01/25/2008, -2/+21The amusing this is that it probably means IE8 will *never* pass the ACID2 test, since the ACID guys won't be embedding non-standard meta-tags in the test, I suspect.
- rderveloy, on 01/25/2008, -6/+23"The worst thing is, it probably took 50 Microsoft employees several months to come up with this stupid idea."
Next time, RTFA.
FTA: "The idea for this new tag was not developed by Microsoft in isolation. The company worked with the Web Standards Project (WaSP) to devise this mechanism, to allow the existing web to work, and the future web to be standards compliant." - lrdntwnd, on 01/25/2008, -5/+22I think that Microsoft would be much better off packaging Firefox with Windows and letting go of IE. It does very little to help their business and it just perpetuates the brokenness and lack of standards on the Internet. They could build-in Windows Live features for Firefox and even build a custom skin for it. It would save them an immense amount of time and development and allow their coders to work on something much more important like fixing Windows itself.
- wiifm69, on 01/25/2008, -20/+36By not forcing web developers to adhere to standards, you are pretty much guaranteeing the survival of animated gifs and everything else 1994.
The worst thing is, it probably took 50 Microsoft employees several months to come up with this stupid idea. A meta tag - a ***** meta tag! - Moskie, on 01/25/2008, -2/+17Why don't they just introduce this meta-tag, but have the browser go into the new standards-compliant mode by default if it isn't provided?
That way, they might "break the web," but they still provide a simple solution to fix sites designed for previous version of IE (include a meta-tag).
That seems like the best of both worlds to me, and an obvious solution. - EricAnderton, on 01/25/2008, -1/+14What MS has done here is allow for developers to "future proof" their webpages such that future releases of IE won't kill the work you've already done. This really is MS helping the community, for once.
It makes sense since you're never going to get CSS implemented 100% correct on any browser. At some point during coding, you have to diverge from the standard in order to "make it work" with the browser(s) you have. That's not supporting MS, that's just being realistic: you wind up doing it for Opera/Safari/FF as well. So knowing that you don't have to redo everything, each time MS releases a new rendition is a step in the right direction.
For that matter, I hope that the Firefox camp has something similar in mind. Imagine the chaos if they suddenly went with a different rendering engine or broke stuff by implementing CSS3. - daveisfera, on 01/25/2008, -7/+20And what is your proposition of how Microsoft is supposed to do that? As much as I hate IE, at least they admit they have painted themselves in a corner and are doing their best to get out.
- Bradl3y, on 01/25/2008, -4/+16Meta is not a MS only tag, and a meta tag for this purpose would still be valid and standards compliant as the meta tag is not limited as to what types of data it can contain.
- zantos420, on 01/25/2008, -0/+11most people (clients) use IE6. winner of the worst web browser ever. I am a web developer and i stick to the standards but I can't even tell you how many CSS "hack" files I've had to make JUST for IE. Not to mention all the hours of cursing at IE and making empty threats at bill gates with my coworkers.
- EricMiIIer, on 07/10/2009, -1/+12True, but we shouldn't have to write multiple style sheets, duplicate code, or yet another vicious gooey IE hack to do so.
- EricAnderton, on 01/25/2008, -2/+11Anyone taking this topic seriously should check out the ALA link. Here's a taste:
meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"
meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4"
meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"
(I blame the comment system - those are supposed to be HTML tags. Sorry)
Not only are these valid HTML, but as http-equiv meta tags go they can also be sent as _headers by the server itself_. That makes retrofitting your existing code a little easier, YMMV of course. - Corrosionx, on 01/25/2008, -1/+10Damn why would they even continue investing in their rendering engines when Gecko is pratically perfect and it would cost them a lot less to implement?
Screw those idiots who designed in Frontpage Express in 1999. - mithrasinvictus, on 01/25/2008, -8/+17Why should all web developers be punished for the ineptitude of those that should not have been allowed to call themselves web developers in the first place?
Good developers have been designing to standards for years now, and making adjustments for bugs in specific browser versions. Now MS expects them to change all those old sites that did not count on the next version of IE being just as crappy as the old one? - theaceoffire, on 01/25/2008, -4/+12We do, and they need to change.
- johnny222, on 01/25/2008, -10/+18I actually think this is a great idea. They could have thought of something much more difficult.
- kidlinux, on 01/25/2008, -0/+8By not forcing developers to adhere to standards we'll always be stuck with the old IE way of doing things. Who's going to change their page to be more standards compliant if it still works with IE8?
- mfearby, on 01/25/2008, -0/+8Methinks you are really being sarcastic. At least, I hope so :-)
- MWeather, on 01/26/2008, -1/+9Why should I pay? It's not my code. I didn't pay for Y2k, either, and I'd have been just as pissed if Microsoft made me opt-in to enable dates after 1999.
- nullcodes, on 01/25/2008, -0/+8Also, if they do this philosophy of letting bugs become features .. they soon have many many modes of IE to deal with in a few version revisions (as new MS or other standards come out, each time the first implementation will be flawed .. and therefore the next version will have to have backward compatibility with that).
- ewarner, on 01/25/2008, -0/+8If we continue to cater to people who refuse to update old technology, we're going to slow our advancement to a crawl. No, we can't change standards overnight, but there needs to be a permanent phasing out of all older IE browsers. How many Mac users still use Safari 1.0 (if their system allows an upgrade?). As a web developer, I have been tempted to not even bother proofing sites in IE 5.5. I still do it just because it's close enough to 6.0's behavior that it's not much extra time. The day IE 6's usage drops below 10%, I will rejoice. I think we should do more to encourage it, though, rather than just waiting for it to happen. The current (and past) rough browser distribution is here, if you were wondering: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a ...
- Edan25, on 01/25/2008, -0/+8Yeah, unfortunately, the damage has already been done.
- mossblaser, on 01/25/2008, -5/+13Maybe some sort of Genuine Browser Advantage?
- technoredneck, on 01/25/2008, -1/+8No, Internet Explorer 6.0 shouldn't have stagnated for nearly seven years so web developers had to hack around it. And fixing standards compliance using a proprietary meta tag is not very, well, standards compliant.
A tag that tells the browser to render the page like version X of browser Y is the most backwards thing I've ever seen. I think Microsoft is doing this so it can let IE 8 stagnate again like IE 6 did. When they release IE 9, they can be lazy and say, "If you would have used our proprietary tag, none of this backwards compatibility wouldn't have been an issue, even if you had to hack around our old and decrepit rendering engine, so we're just gonna give you a great big middle finger, suckers." - andycr512, on 01/25/2008, -0/+7It's his fault IE doesn't follow any obvious method of interpreting HTML, and certainly not the standards?
- Planets, on 01/26/2008, -1/+8"One of the nastier things about being a web developer, I'm told, is the existence of Internet Explorer."
- Edan25, on 01/25/2008, -1/+8It is an endless circle.
A lot of people use IE > Web developers must support IE if they want a serious site > IE is supported > People still use IE.
If people stopped using IE the web would be in another place. - IphtashuFitz, on 01/25/2008, -1/+7Microsoft has always been overly obsessed with backward compatibility. I wrote some shareware back in the early 1990's on Windows 3.0 before Windows 95 ever came out. I can't compile the source code (written in Visual C++ 1.5) with any modern compilers since it uses a number of DLL hacks that only existed early on, but the program still runs fine on every version of Windows so far. I'd have to rewrite a large amount of the source from scratch if I wanted to build a more modernized version of it for NT, XP, Vista, etc.
- nickj6282, on 01/25/2008, -2/+8That's a pipe dream at best. Microsoft doesn't do anything if it doesn't extend their Windows/Office monopoly. This move for IE8 is just another "Embrace, extend, extinguish".
- vanscott, on 01/25/2008, -2/+8I laugh and cringe at the same time thinking about the developers working on IE 8. They probably would enjoy strangling the people who set them on this silly path 5-10 years ago.
All things considered, this could be a whole lot worse. Best part is, it looks as is MS learned a lesson here and will hopefully look to standards instead of establishing their own. - inactive, on 01/26/2008, -0/+6Not to mention that IE will be bigger now since it will have two rendering engines. Come'on Microsoft, you can do better.
- jejones, on 01/25/2008, -9/+14Yes, and by doing so, WaSP, or rather, those members of WaSP involved, sold itself and web developers down the river, and made a laughing stock of the organization. All this does is let MS subvert the standards while paying lip service to them.
- bcamp1973, on 01/25/2008, -11/+16pure freekin' stupidity! but that's what we've come to expect. as a web developer i can probably count the time of my life wasted on IE crap in man years, not man hours...
- vdog, on 01/25/2008, -0/+5Standards are set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and while MS can set it own, having both is just nightmare- imagine having to having to go from driving on the left side of the road to the right and vice versa as you drive from town to town.
All you end up with is chaos, confusion, and broken machines surrounded by broken glass (usually because the web dev threw their PC through a window in frustration).
One standard is all that is needed, and you don't want to go with MS's; unlike the W3C they are a FOR profit organisation. If their way becomes the only way, you can bet that they'll charge developers money for the rights to use it. - afx1, on 01/25/2008, -0/+5your segue from web standards to Huckleberry was smooth as butter. barely even noticed it!
- victorycig, on 01/25/2008, -6/+11I love ars. Their articles are almost always thoughtful and accurate. This is no exception.
- MWeather, on 01/26/2008, -0/+4The tag itself is compliant, changing rendering modes based on it is not. We have the doctype for that.
- zwaldowski, on 01/25/2008, -1/+5You're right. They need to do it reverse: standards mode by default, with quirks by a special meta tag. IE7-style mode is useless; it's recent enough, developers should adapt for it.
- inactive, on 01/26/2008, -0/+4***** IE!
- nickj6282, on 01/25/2008, -1/+5Holy *****! I laughed so hard at your "ITT Tech" comment I got coke (the drink) in my nose.
ITT Tech is a joke. They do everything the "Microsoft Way" and no other. You should have seen the way that some instructors looked at me when I mentioned things like Linux and Firefox. You want to learn web design at ITT? They'll teach you to write pages for quirks mode in IE6 using ASP only. Their library and online learning database don't seem to know anything about Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby/etc. - Edan25, on 01/25/2008, -1/+5http://www.w3.org/
Microsoft chose to ignore those standards back then, and web developers suffer from it today.
Microsoft can have it's own standards, but it's just not meant to work, they're not alone after all. Maybe they were back then. - solistus, on 01/26/2008, -0/+4By acting like Windows doesn't need to be fixed, it's pretty clear you know little about technology. Vista still prioritises its silly built-in media DRM over network activity on a stack level, so it still gets atrocious network performance when a media file is played. This is one of countless bugs that has everyone who knows what the hell they're talking about to demand Vista SP1 as soon as possible. MS has agreed and is releasing it relatively soon.
Nothing IE has ever done has prompted innovation in Firefox. Name one feature IE implemented first that turned out to be a good idea. The only time other browsers copy IE behaviours is for compatibility purposes. IE is a piece of ***** that is used for web designers solely to test compatibility with IE, and the web community would be elated to see it killed off. - steviepunk, on 01/26/2008, -0/+4At the end of the day, if there are a significant number of any browser out there, then a website needs to work for that browser (whether IE6, IE7, IE8, Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc).
While you might get away with not supporting a browser for a personal website, if you develop sites commercially, then your clients just won't accept that 30% (ish) of web users can't access the site properly just because IE6 isn't standards compliant, you have to make sure they can view it as well.
Seems to me that having a meta tag should at least help make it easier make sites work on the different versions or IE.
Of course, it does put us in a bit of a vicious circle, however with any luck we'll see IE6 disappear properly as IE7 is freed of it's WGA requirement (and let's hope IE8 doesn't require WGA!) - ewarner, on 01/26/2008, -0/+4Except in this case the hippies want to FOLLOW the rules that "the man" is breaking.
- D4rklight, on 01/25/2008, -0/+4http://media.arstechnica.com/staff.media/320/acidt ...
lol -
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