A little while back the web development blogs were abuzz with Microsoft’s announcement that IE 8 will, by default, render in IE7 mode, so as not to “break the web.”
Well, it seems that the IE team have decided to change that decision, and decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. Continue reading
So Microsoft announced a way to support standards without “breaking the web.”
The challenge they had was to find a way to “enable (and encourage) interoperable web development, but don’t force IE to break pages that work properly in IE today.â€
They eventually settled for a <meta>-based “opt-in to the browser version I tested with†strategy.
What this means is that if you as a web developer want IE 8 to render according to their best implementation of standards then you opt in by adding a particular meta element into your HTML (or send down a similar HTTP header in the response).
In other words, for web developers trying to do the right thing they must pay a small “don’t-break-the-IE-web tax!”
Many prominent web developers and designers have been highly critical of this. But, ironically, is this actually a positive thing in the long run? Continue reading
This has been said so many times on the web by web developers frustrated at IE’s rendering bugs, lack of progress in support for web technologies, and so on, that at first I didn’t want to bother writing this post. However, a number of other posts on this site make reference to this point and I end up repeating myself, side tracking from the point at hand. For that reason, and for the benefit of some readers not familiar with this issue, this post serves as a summary of those concerns. Continue reading