The IE team announced a change from their previously stated plan for IE 8 ‘involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately’ via a specific bit of meta information delivered per page or at the server level. After a lot of discussion in the community, some of it quite heated, Microsoft has relented. IE8 will now ‘show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).’
Microsoft is notorious amongst the Web development community for past decisions, some, like their initial decision on this issue, made with the best of intentions; so it is great to see that they are willing to step back, re-evaluate and change their direction when the community speaks up. It is a change from the old days, and alongside their shift regarding open source, I truly hope it is an indicator of the future.
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3 comments so far… Jump into the discussion and tell us what you think.
That is good news; special coddling for IE has been a tax on web development for years, adding scores of person-hours to every project. As always with MS we’ll have to wait and see if they deliver as we think they will, but there seems to be a strain of platform neutrality growing there with Silverlight and now this decision on IE standards.
Indeed Todd. I would love to see IE8 move in the right direction so those development hours are channeled towards building new and exciting tools and sites instead of debugging projects that should work across all major browsers.
Last night I bowled with someone one the IE8 team and passed on the sentiment with big thanks, complete with a hug, for standards compliance as the default mode. Giving feedback for something like that in person is so much nicer than a comment form :)