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Microsoft Embraces Web Standards, IE8 to be Fully Standards-Compliant by Default

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

“Our initial plan had been to use IE7-compatible behavior as the default setting for IE8, to minimize potential impact on the world’s existing Web sites. We have now decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default in IE8″

This is killer. In spite of a long history of making life difficult for standards-aware developers, Microsoft has reversed their proposal of targeting versions of Internet Explorer within IE8. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 will indeed render using the new fully standards-compliant IE8 engine by default.

Back in January Microsoft announced they were proposing to have Internet Explorer 8 render like IE7 by default, unless a particular meta tag was added to the the document explicitly targeting which version of IE to use. If no version was declared via this method, it would default to use IE7’s engine by default. Crazy, I know. I thought so too. Essentially, they would have been implementing full standards support on an opt-in basis only.

An article was posted on ALA by Aaron Gustafson claiming that this was the “Light at the end of the tunnel” for developers. This ignited an extensive debate across the blogs of industry experts. Roger Johansson, Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith fought the good fight all the way through, while Zeldman, Meyer and Jonathan Snook defended Microsoft’s proposal.

Personally I feel that the Version Targeting would have been a step in the wrong direction for the Web Standards movement and how far it has already come. I am thrilled Microsoft has acknowledged how important this truly is. Web Standards have shaped modern web development in alot of good ways, and it’s a big deal and enormous benefit to have Microsoft completely on board. The last thing we need is more IE lock-in.

John Resig posted on reddit yesterday: “Yeah, this is huge for a ton of reasons - largest of which is that Microsoft is effectively saying “Web Standards are so important to us that we’re willing to potentially sacrifice market share in order see them succeed.” Which is a big thing for a dominant company to do.”

And despite selling the proposal aggressively in his initial ALA post, Gustafson ended up retracting his inital pitch. “…I have to say I’m glad they’ve reversed that decision. In the end, this does put more pressure on them to get the word out about how version targeting can prevent a recurrence of the issues that came about when IE7 released, but, personally, I feel their product (and the web at large) is better for it.”

A good day for the web, no doubt. For further reading, Digital Web has a great list of many of the relevant blog posts.

Posted in Browsers, Web Standards | 1 Comment

Archive for the ‘Web Standards’ Category

Microsoft Embraces Web Standards, IE8 to be Fully Standards-Compliant by Default

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