Recently Microsoft announced that the upcoming version of Internet Explorer will feature a special meta element, which will trigger the standards mode. It will look something like this:
It’s further described by Aaron Gustafson in Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8.
Many acclaimed standardistas instantly uttered their general dislike of the idea. To me it seems like Microsoft has chosen this path out of resignation. There’s too many invalid web sites out there, and instead of making people deal with the problem they enable this route of eternal backward compatibility.
This seems like an odd decision by the IE team. Since most people won’t know about the switch, they will likely end up in the default IE7 mode and be utterly confused why IE8 doesn’t behave as they thought it would.
Related posts
7 comments
Leave a reply