Sitestone

If you haven’t read about the about the IE-8 versioning uproar, please read the articles on A List Apart, Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 and Eric Meyer’s piece.

In short, for the upcoming next version of internet explorer, IE8, we will have to add a special meta tag to our web pages to ask IE8 to render the web pages in IE8 compliant mode. If you don’t add that meta tag, your web page will be rendered as IE7.

Why? What happened?

From Microsoft’s point of view, it’s very simple.

IE6 has a broken standard support. So IE6 can’t render webpages build with web standards. IE7 fixed some of the bugs of IE6. Webpages not having been build using webstandards, build to work only in IE6, “broke” when people and companies upgraded their browsers to IE7. Many customers complained to Microsoft about their pages not displaying properly or websites not functioning properly anymore. Not surprisingly. Especially when you think about all those big intranets build only for IE6.

Now, Microsoft is afraid it will happen again when they ship IE8. Many software products build by Microsoft, which are used to make webcontent (Frontpage, Word, Sharepoint, intranet software, etc etc), don’t produce valid standards-compliant web content. These software products produce messy code. Again, Microsoft is afraid it’s clients will get angry when they see their webpages, build with that Microsoft software, breaks in the next release of IE8.

The problem

So what’s the problem with this meta tag idea? First of all, web standards have been invented for a reason. Build one site, according to the standards, and you know it will work in all standards compliant web browsers. Now and in the future. Every other modern browser out there (Firefox, Safari, Opera) works like that. You don’t have to specify which browsers or which versions you build the site for. That’s a good thing! Remember those pages saying “this website is best viewed in IE6 or Netscape”?

The practice of developing for specific browsers is or should be something for the past. When IE7 came out, many web developers were forced to update their sites. Now, when this meta tag idea will be implemented, these developers can code purely for a specific version of IE and forget about it. Another piece of the web is frozen in time and will not take advantage of improvements or enhancements which would benefit all users.

Why not turn it around? If someone really needs to support an old buggy browser like IE6 or IE7, he or she should add a meta tag to opt-in. For all other websites, build using web standards, browsers should render in standards mode. Web documents should be compliant with W3C recommendations, not with user agents.

Not surprisingly, many people argue that this whole IE6/Intranet problem is Microsoft’s problem, and that Microsoft should fix it.

Microsoft’s failure to open communication

Another issue which is a problem for many people is the way this has been made public. If it weren’t for the efforts of people like Molly , we probably would not have heard about this until IE8 shipped. The web should be based on open standards, emerging from public, open discussion. Not on what’s been decided behind closed doors of a single company.

What will happen?

It’s still very unsure and you’ll read many different predictions. But one of them is very scary. Say IE8 comes out. It will render websites as IE7 by default. Unless a web developer has put in the meta tag specifically asking IE8 to render the page as IE8.

However, the problem is, most websites are not made by people knowing about web standards. So the large majority of websites will render as IE7. What this does is make IE7 the defacto new standard. And all those sites will keep working the exact same way when a new version of IE comes out. If IE9 comes out, all those sites will still be rendered as IE7. The first problem with this is that there will be no incentive for anyone to make the websites standards compliant. The second problem is that when you view those websites made for IE7 using a real standards-compliant browsers, like Firefox, Safari and Opera, those sites will not render properly. Will appear broken. Therefore, people will think those browsers are broken!

So is this just an anti-competitive “divide, assimilate, conquer” approach from Microsoft to stop the rise of other browsers?

Some hope

The only hope in this scenario is that enough people will realize that it is in fact IE being broken. And that enough people realize that the real progress is made in other browsers then IE. And that enough people make the switch to those other browsers, thereby diminishing the IE market share.

There’s another hope left: Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs like HTML5. That means I can write my web pages in a completely standards based way (CSS, HTML5, JavaScript) and not having to use a browser-centric tag in order to do so. Unfortunately it will still be a long time before HTML5 will be supported widely.

What are others saying?

In the last couple of days many people, either involved in web standards or passionate about web standards, have written about this matter. Good lists of links can be found on Digital Web and on Max design. Molly Herzlog has a very open piece on the matter Me, IE8 and Microsoft versioning

Edit: another great article on the B-list, with some good background info.