Hi, my name is Kimberly Blessing. I'm a computer scientist, Web developer, standards evangelist, feminist, and geek. This is where I write about life, the Web, technology, women's issues, and whatever else comes to mind.
The Annoying IE8 Loophole
Right now, the Web Standards community is celebrating. After weeks of telling us otherwise, Microsoft has announced that IE8 will enable standards mode by default.
Like others, I’m very happy about this change and I applaud Microsoft for reversing their decision. However there’s something bothering me about their latest statement…
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).
You see, originally Microsoft wanted us to add an HTTP header or META tag in order to indicate that a page was compliant with the latest-and-greatest standards mode; now that we get that mode by default, we don’t need the header/tag — except to explicitly indicate that we want the older, IE7-like standards mode.
Don’t see the loophole yet? If you work for a big company that’s not quite so Web Standards savvy, you might. The loophole is that there’s nothing in IE8 that’s going to force anyone to upgrade their code! While you, dear Standards-abiding designer/developer, want this opportunity to clean up your site and trash the old code, The Man is going to tell you that there’s no point investing in this change and they’re going to point you to the HTTP header/META tag solution.
So, now is the time to begin strategizing — how are you going to convince your boss(es) that an IE8 code refresh is necessary? Also, how do you plan to support IE8 and IE7, and possibly even IE6 and IE5.5?
Go ahead and start the party without me… I need to work this one out first.
Comments (3)
Microsoft is very clever to introduce such a Meta element. This also would force other browser manufacturers to show the IE-Rendering Engines. In my opinion, it will be the best to write web pages in a uniform standard and the browser manufacturers implement just this standard. This will remain probably a dream.
Kimberly, it’s true that we won’t be forcing anyone to upgrade their web pages; that would be pretty arrogant of us to do. But I’d point out that the obvious advantages of designing with standards to begin with are pretty big; and advancements in the platform will occur in “standards mode”, not in our compatibility modes.
And Nico, the other browsers do not already have “IE7 standards mode compatibility mode”, nor do I think they are interested in providing that level of compatibility.
(oh, and it’s not weeks – I’ve been saying for over a year that we would need authors to opt in to standards. :) )
-Chris Wilson
That’s a good point, Kimberley. Hopefully these people will at least recognize the reason why their pages are breaking and that it might be easier next time around if they coded to standards in the first place. I also hope that Microsoft will make it clear that this is why sites are breaking and that coding to standards will help to ensure that changes won’t be necessary in the future.
For me, we’ll have to see how much breaks when a public version of IE is available. Anything I’ve coded recently is forwards compatible using conditional comments so it should be okay. Anything older but still in use probably needs a re-visit anyway. Of course, I’m not working for one of the big corporations that you speak of :)