Internet Explorer 8 Tries New Compatibility Solution

[Ash]

Came across this article while bored at work!

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news...le.php/3723291

Seems M$ will be launching IE8 with a dual standards.

Quote:
"Microsoft is working to avoid that problem in version 8 by letting Web web site hosting developers signal to IE how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages, according to a blog post on Microsoft's IEBlog this week."

why do they bother! why can't they just launch a browser that is fully W3 compliant! and save us developers a lot of time.

e.g.
1. check in Firefox - cool it works
2. check in IE7 - dam, change code, yep now it works
3 check in IE6 - cry, do my best to hack the code so it works
4. think about checking with IE5 but to scared to!
etc. etc.etc.

any way thought this may be of some interest... suppose I better do some proper work now.

Ta

Ash

[WelshTom]

Originally Posted by Ash

Came across this article while bored at work!

www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3723291

Seems M$ will be launching IE8 with a dual standards.

Quote:
"Microsoft is working to avoid that problem in version 8 by letting Web web site hosting developers signal to IE how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages, according to a blog post on Microsoft's IEBlog this week."

why do they bother! why can't they just launch a browser that is fully W3 compliant! and save us developers a lot of time.

e.g.
1. check in Firefox - cool it works
2. check in IE7 - dam, change code, yep now it works
3 check in IE6 - cry, do my best to hack the code so it works
4. think about checking with IE5 but to scared to!
etc. etc.etc.

any way thought this may be of some interest... suppose I better do some proper work now.

Ta

Ash

Enabling ACID2 compatibility in a browser is rather pointless, as literally no website hostings used ACID2 compliancy.

[Ash]

I don''t understand your comments Thomas? I thought ACID2 is used to see if your browser was is compatible with w3 standards. how can it be pointless?

[esnail]

I can understand why Microsoft have chosen to introduce the meta tag to specify the browser mode - it is a solution to offer legacy support for existing website hostings that have been poorly coded and currently work in older IE browsers including IE7. What I can't understand is that the default setting in IE8 will not be standards compliance mode, instead it'll be legacy mode and its only with the addition of this meta tag that IE8 will then become standards compliant. Every web site hosting I build from now on (or at least when IE8 comes out) I will now have to enter this piece of code, thus bloating (albeit slightly) the code content of the file and compromising the purity of what web standards aims to achieve: clean, un-bloated semantic html.
Part of the reason for this strange decision I suspect is so that very old and very poorly coded website hostings that look find in IE6 and earlier will undoubtedly break in the newer browsers and microsoft are committed to not 'breaking the web'. But for me, it would make more sense to included a facility within the browser itself to choose the legacy version rather than forcing otherwise unnecessary meta tags into all new web pages.

[RecruiTT]

What I don't understand is that always developers are confronting with bugs in IE. Whenever a new Firefox comes out it does not cause that much problems. I think that microsoft has a problem with developing a good web browser (or at least the best web browser).