The Internet Explorer 8 Debate Continues…
The web development community (including yours truly) received a huge shock this past Tuesday when The IE team at Microsoft announced their planned technique for allowing IE8 be standards compliant - at least in some fashion - without breaking backwards compatibility for older websites.
Developers of the industry as a whole are increasingly fed up with having to ensure that sites are at least functional and presentable in IE6 - a difficult task when that browser has such poor standards support compared to today’s browsers. Part of the fuss is the fact that IE8’s standards mode will be essentially locked to as it was in IE7, with no improvements, while the super-standards mode would be for the latest and greatest standards support. The other, I think bigger, part is that taking advantage of the super-standards mode involves an opt-in via an additional meta tag in the head of the web page.
I got into this in a bit more depth on my previous posting, How IE8 Gets Standards Compliant. I won’t go into all those details here, but will be disclosing what I have learned of the situation since publishing that post.
The debate on the subject has been quite heated, with some quite, uh, cheeky language involved. That seems to be coming from a large portion - not necessarily a majority - of developers. Others are more levelheaded, resulting in some rational discussion of pros and cons of this technique, as well as suggesting alternatives.
A commonly suggested alternate method would be to reverse the way the current technique works, by making super-standards mode the default, and providing an opt-out option for those sites that need the IE6-7 level of rendering. This seems to be preferable when moving forwards and building new sites, but there are so many websites out there now that would need to be updated to include the opt-out meta tag if needing the older rendering. This may not sit well with people who have to maintain those websites.
There have been some more posts on the subject, from some notable members of the community. Molly Holzschlag posted on her site some news that she was involved in this process, but fought to open it up and to be communicative about what was happening. Apparently, she and others involved were under an NDA agreement, and could not say anything until the fact was finally made public. As she puts it, it is not the ideal solution, but they looked at several ideas and the current one was preferable to the others. And she believes that it is much better that we know about this now, rather than closer to the release of IE8. And I agree. Molly, do keep up the good work!
There is a list of individuals with their own posts, that work for competing browser vendors. The list is, ironically, on the Opera Watch blog. There are links to posts made by individuals working for various browser organizations, including Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. A lot of interesting reading there.
I also found an interesting post from John Resig, where he states that if you use the HTML5 doctype, IE8 will automatically switch to super-standards mode, no opt-in required. This is very good to know, and I think could render much of the overall debate moot. And an interesting part of this revelation is that it will force all current browsers to switch to standards mode, even if they don’t understand HTML5! HTML5 is still a work in progress, but apparently the doctype can be used starting now, and pages with that doctype will be rendered in standards mode - regardless of browser - for a long time to come. This is interesting to know, as pages moving forward could be built with the HTML5 doctype, and older pages could have IE8 using the basic standards mode by default. Hmm…It could be that solves the whole problem.
It is good that the IE team are trying to get IE up to date. However, the way I read the situation, the technique as it stands only puts off the problem for a while. I don’t think it is likely that all websites are going to suddenly have the required opt-in meta element required for super-standards mode. So it seems that when it comes time to start on IE9, we will be going through this debate all over again.
I think the best, long-term solution requires breaking backwards compatibility at some point. And in some ways it is preferable to do it here and now, and not in 4 or 5 years, as it will be much more of a problem then. And history will repeat, unless the cycle is broken somewhere, somehow. Would you rather have a short-term gain with long-term pain, or short-term pain with a long-term gain? I think this is the key point.
The current technique really should be rethought and refined so it will work for the people, and not create more work for them.