Ars Technica published an article about how Microsoft intends to further it’s standard compliance in their next browser version, Internet Exlporer 8. Since IE5.5, MS has been trying to implement some sort of web standard compliance into their browser - they’ve regularly come up short or just bungled the process altogether. Web developers already know what a mess version 5.5 was and how version 6 tried to fix the mess with a doctype switching mechanism that allowed developers to design around both versions. Unfortunately this resulted in a lot of hacks and workarounds to get sites working across other browsers and MS’s own.

When version 7 was released MS furthered their standard compliance which further broke even more web sites which made businesses and users reluctant to upgrade. MS apparently will be forcing everyone to use IE7 very soon.

With IE8, MS intends yet further their standards compliance to the level of FireFox, Safari and Opera. This is great news for designers and developers alike - but in true MS style, the implementation is crappy and just plain weird. First off, a third rendering mode will be implemented to take advantage of the new standards - this is for backward compatibility. To invoke this new rendering mode, MS is using a <meta> tag that IE8 will look for. This is really a poor idea and yet forces web developers/designers to keep having to consider IE separately - even if it renders the same in FF/Safari/Opera…Just as strange is apparently MS worked closely with WaSP to develop this new tag. How weird, the Web Standards Project group developing a non-standard procedure! While I’m looking forward to the easier web development and design I just don’t get this silly procedure.

Read the whole article.

Technorati Tags: IE8, Microsoft, development, web browser

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under standards, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.