{"id":76,"date":"2008-01-24T00:09:01","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T04:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/24\/thoughts-on-beyond-doctype-web-standards-forward-compatibility-and-ie8\/"},"modified":"2008-01-26T00:42:35","modified_gmt":"2008-01-26T04:42:35","slug":"thoughts-on-beyond-doctype-web-standards-forward-compatibility-and-ie8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/2008\/01\/24\/thoughts-on-beyond-doctype-web-standards-forward-compatibility-and-ie8\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now most web designers and developers should have heard the ruckus and furor caused by the article in issue 251 of “A List Apart.<\/a>” After reading the source article, the accompanying article by Eric Meyer, the assorted comments on ALA, and various blog entries amongst the web – here are my thoughts.<\/p>\n

I’m not against the meta tag “switch”. But I think Microsoft is doing itself and the web a disservice by implementing the process backwards in my mind. The browser should always attempt to display the best (and then degrade gracefully). As it is proposed now, you have to add the meta tag to get IE 8 to act as IE 8 and not IE 7. In my mind the tag should be the switch to get the latest IE to act like an earlier version.<\/p>\n

Of course the primary reason MS has this whole mess (and why we web designers and developers hate IE6) is the fact that MS tried to make Internet Explorer more then a browser – they attempted to make it a “platform” running ActiveX applications along with a special (others would say bastardized) Javascript. Add a several year hiatus to IE’s development and you get this terrible mess of a browser with “applications” that rely on its “brokenness” to work correctly. And now they’re asking us to code a special “switch” to get their browser to render the standards correctly. (Oh and possibly maintain the historical look of your website – which defeats one of the cool aspects of the internet – that it’s always changing and evolving).<\/p>\n

Sorry Microsoft. I strongly suggest that if you do decide to use the meta tag “switch” that you reverse the behavior. The meta tag “switch” should be used to turn “on” the IE bugginess, not turn it off. Finally, this approach probably won’t ever be adopted by other browser vendors which will mean that the meta tag “switch” will invariably become worthless except to poorly written web sites. Such sites would be much better off re-writing their code and applications to actual modern web standards. It would be much more cost-effective for everyone.<\/p>\n

That’s my thoughts anyway.<\/p>\n

Further Thoughts<\/strong>: If this meta tag is the only way MS can push IE 8 to full standards compliance and still keep customers happy in the near future, so be it. But at some point Microsoft will need to ditch it and tell those who haven’t recoded their sites to standards that they really should (which is funny and sad because MS built many of the tools that created such buggy code in many cases) and join the rest of the civilized browser world where coding is done to standards and if it looks funky in the browser the first suspect should be bad code, not a quirky, non-standard browser rendering engine. At the very least this should only be in place until IE 10. Which they better deliver within the next 2 years. Otherwise the critics of the meta tag will be considered correct in viewing this as a cynical ploy by Microsoft to try and control the web. All of which, if true or even thought to be true, may prove to be the downfall of Internet Explorer as web developers, their clients, and even the average person begins to understand just how poorly a citizen IE has been, and continues to be, on the web. P.S. – I still think the meta tag implementation is backwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By now most web designers and developers should have heard the ruckus and furor caused by the article in issue 251 of “A List Apart.” After reading the source article, the accompanying article by Eric Meyer, the assorted comments on ALA, and various blog entries amongst the web – here are my thoughts. I’m not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bemdesign.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}