Comments on: Thoughts on “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8″

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:42:28 +0000

It's true MS has a poor history of playing well with others, but with the current legal, business, and social environment MS is having to either tread very carefully with its proprietary stuff or build in compatibility. A great example is that the Fed. Courts put MS on another 2 years of court oversight. It is noteworthy though that several commentators on this latest issue have brought up the "And what if Windows ASP servers render them faster and better?" It's definitely out there but I'm going with the "trust but verify". The other thing is is that no one has to put in the meta tag and many designers and developers are promising to do that which means that Microsoft might very well be killing off IE due to it's non-compliance with the standards. The only way for this to work out sort-of okay for MS is to 1) reverse the function of the meta tag so that IE8's default behavior is standards based (the tag tells it to not render in standards) and 2) as quickly as possible get everyone off the meta-tag. Otherwise this might become the reality: Has Internet Explorer Just Shot Itself in the Foot?

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:24:24 +0000

I tend to be a little less charitable toward Microsoft.

When you are the big guy, and you make both the authoring tools that build the pages to be rendered and the viewing tool (IE), then the main thing you want is for all of YOUR stuff to look good when working together. Full compatibility with “web standards” means full compatibility with your competitor’s products, and then they might look as good as you do. So that is not high on the list of necessary things.

I’m reluctant to suggest that MS might actually have internal meetings to figure out the “best” incompatibilities to design into their products, but I would not be surprised if they do.

Microsoft’s priorities are:

[1] Serve Microsoft
[2] Don’t tick off your own customers unless necessary as a strategy to do item [1].
[3] Don’t tick off others who might become MS customers, unless necessary as a strategy to do item [1].

Microsoft has tried quite hard to take effective ownership of the Internet through the powerful effect of their 90% market share. That is why they worked so hard to kill Netscape, back in the days before they were found (by the court ruling) to be a monopoly. They have to be a bit more careful now, but the motivation remains the same.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:35:01 +0000

The meta tag in itself doesn’t hurt – it’s the fact that Doctype was supposed to be the solution to this originally but because of IE, it now won’t help MS as they try to 1) maintain backwards compliance for corporate clients and 2) move on to the future by adopting web standards. Too many people are using doctype inappropriately. The problem MS faces is that it has 2 very different audiences: One is business that have bought into the IE cluelessness and built sites to IE 6 compliance and the other is the rest of the world who use web standards and compliant browsers.The way MS has built IE and it’s HTML editing/creation tools has messed even the doctype solution. Thus the reason for the meta tag solution – the meta tag gives MS a solution to meet the needs of these two groups. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that other then the way MS thinks the default should work – IE 8 will default to IE 7 rendering unless the meta tag is present. That’s just “wrong” in my view.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:18:55 +0000

I hadn’t heard about this until now. I don’t know what I think about it yet. I’ve always felt that the DOCTYPE idea kind of sucked because it was so unlike anything else in the page. That being said, the information provided by the DOCTYPE is useful to have for rendering pages in sane ways. I’m not sure what impact adding this meta tag would have, but it seems that more hints from the developer can’t really hurt. They can always be ignored, right? To prevent browsers from becoming bloated crapware, in fact, it may be necessary to ignore it. Who really wants to ship Firefox 6 with 3 or 4 rendering engines? Or who wants to maintain the code if they try to integrate it into one engine?

The web evolves. So should the way crappy old pages look.