Comments on: Principles and Legality

By: Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Announcing a career change and life change

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:23:55 +0000

[...] to complain to the E.U. about Microsoft’s abuse of web standards, but in hindsight, many see a link between Opera’s complaint and Microsoft’s change of heart over IE8’s standards compliance. To me, that’s a proven track record that is a good [...]

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:12:19 +0000

Perhaps some of us agree then, that this is better because 1) it sends a clear message to developers that standards are the path to the future web (so we do not break the future), and 2) less than or equal to IE7 will hopefully die a slow death in at most five years. However (and this is a big However), now that we all see the Beta, where is the full W3C DOM support that we were told would catastrophically break the limited old web while enabling the unlimited future web?

But, let me end with this thought. How would we all feel about fully supporting NN4? Would requiring full NN4 support for an eternity move the web forwards or backwards?

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:09:23 +0000

So this was all about forcing “lazy” developers to act the way we think they should, to have them conform to our way of thinking instead of the other way around? Is that what drove the outcry? Not concern for the future of browsers or the web, but merely concern for our own convenience and sense of superiority?

By: Alan Hogan

Alan Hogan — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 23:41:59 +0000

While you’re correct and version targetting will still be a problem, at least now lazy developers will often be forced to choose between standards and actively opting in to IE7 behavior. The alternative might have been continuing to exist blissfully unaware that their site sucks in standards-based browsers.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:44:32 +0000

Hallvord: But I would think the multiple-profile support issues would still arise, and so I don’t see why this is substantiatively different for Opera, Safari, Gecko, etc. in terms of engineering effort and competitive pressures. Sure, maybe in five years it will have died a slow death, but what about the demands it places on IE’s competitors in the meantime? And if those are still in place and therefore just as onerous, shouldn’t there still be widespread opposition to the idea? If not, why not?

By: Hallvord R. M. Steen

Hallvord R. M. Steen — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:04:36 +0000

Regarding the “hosannas”, an option that isn’t default will be MUCH less used. Rather all new pages on the web adapting themselves to IE7′s frozen quirks only those that are explicitly marked X-UA-Compatible will do so, and we hope that this tag/header won’t be all that common and actually die a slow death.

By: Isaac Lin

Isaac Lin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:22:14 +0000

If web page creators continue to work around bugs by either using standard-compliant markup which can render correctly by itself in standard-compliant browsers, or using mechanisms like conditional comments, then version targeting should only affect the targeted browser (IE). Should creators start deliberately using IE version targeting instead of conditional comments or other safe ways of feeding IE-specific instructions to IE browsers only, then there could be a decrease in standards-compliant sites. Hopefully Microsoft and others will continue to push the message on how to safely workaround any bugs, and version targeting will simply be the method of last resort to catch any lingering issues.

By: Adam Cook

Adam Cook — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:00:58 +0000

If the only allowed and processed tag would be the IE=7 tag, it would be part of the solution.

If IE8 is as standard compliant as MS wants it to be, i.e. like Opera and FF, there shouldn’t be a need for IE9 to render pages like it’s IE8. Let it render IE=whatever like IE7, and let those sites slowly fall away as ppl become aware of the advantages of new code in HTML5 and beyond that is not supported in the IE7 engine.
If ppl want to be stuck in 2006, let them.

Another point ppl made is the broken DOCTYPE thing cause editors put it in willy nilly so that it lost all meaning. IE=* has that same potential. Again only recognizing IE=7 would solve that, eventually the newer programs will want to use new standards that are not compatible with IE7 and they’d stop using it.
New versions will have to be made anyway to put it in their current broken programs, they will be forced to take a good look at their next version.

This way there’s no need to include an ever increasing set of API’s.

Any disadvantages to this approach I’m not seeing?

perhaps an intermediate step could be used to only support IE=edge,standard,old – a shifting model, giving developers more time to move along with the times. haven’t thought this out though.

I’ve come to this late, apologies if this idea is unoriginal, i’ve not read all the blogs yet. The more I read on the various comments on ALA and some other blogs, the more I felt there was something ppl were missing. Besides, the ALA comments were closed :)

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:46:21 +0000

I’d think that many people think it’s good enough because it is good enough — for them.

For the Web and other browser vendors it remains to be seen, however. It all depends on how much authors code only for IE and how they go about that. If we get various large blocks of sites each coded towards a specific IE version (5, 7, 8, 9, etc.) we’re in trouble.

By: Georg

Georg — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:13:39 +0000

Any improvement is great when compared with the worst scenario: ‘opt-in’ or IE7 forever. That IE’ default now is for progress, will have a positive effect on the work of more designers then if the default was “stuck in the past for ever”.

That we’ll still have to code our way through the same growing number of versions and modes for ages, is bad. However, it has become “the norm” now and there’s nothing we can do to change it.

“Good” would be if we could code to spec without having to test in UAs and worry about versions or modes. Won’t happen in my life-time, so I’m (conditionally) happy for any minor improvement I can find.

By: Paul D. Waite

Paul D. Waite — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:05:57 +0000

do you have thoughts as to why so many people seem to think that it is [good enough]?

I do, although they might be a bit disingenuous. I think most of the hostile reactions were based on emotion. I know I get pretty attached to my code, and I think the idea of having to include a meta tag to get standards-y behaviour made some folks feel like Microsoft was encroaching on their territory.

This is all just ill-informed armchair psychology, of course.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:49:45 +0000

Eric, I understand this as a clear message to developers that they should support standards for continued interoperability, and that supporting IE7 indefinitely will lead to an unwanted burden for developers. So, with the default now set to IE8, and once most users have IE8 … IE7 support can be dropped from libraries. Thus, those developers still wishing to support IE7 indefinitely can then do so on their own time.

By: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:39:46 +0000

Anne, I think we can (almost) all agree it's better to some degree, slight or great. So is that good enough? And if not, do you have thoughts as to why so many people seem to think that it is?

By: Hubbers

Hubbers — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:56:16 +0000

Let’s be honest with ourselves. It will still require all the usual tweaking and head banging to get all browsers to work the same – but this is a huge positive step forward for MS (whatever the motivation).

Any they do say not to look a gift horse in the mouth …

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:34:09 +0000

Currently, standards-conscious designers will test their webpages in a browser such as Firefox or Opera, then tweak them so they look the same in IE. The others test first in IE and fix (or not) for other browsers. If both IE and the other browsers render webpages in the same way, what’s the difference?

The one loophole here is that designers could add in the meta tag *before* starting on a webpage (and I’m sure some will) but I can’t imagine that most will go that extra step to make their lives harder.