Recently Microsoft announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 will introduce a special meta element for triggering standards mode. It will look something like this.
Aaron Gustafson goes into the details in Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. And almost immediately, the standardistas reached for their pitchforks.
It’s not difficult to understand why. To me, this feels less like a clever solution and more like an exhausted surrender. The web is already littered with broken, invalid sites built around years of Internet Explorer quirks, hacks and questionable decisions. Rather than finally drawing a line in the sand and saying this is how browsers work now, Microsoft appears determined to preserve the whole archaeological dig indefinitely.
Backward compatibility is useful, of course. So is keeping old buildings standing. But at some point you have to stop adding wooden supports and admit that the plumbing is rotten. The strangest part is that most developers probably won’t even know the switch exists. Their sites will quietly fall back to IE7 rendering mode, at which point they’ll stare at the screen wondering why their shiny new IE8 behaves suspiciously like the browser they thought they had just escaped. And somewhere, another conditional stylesheet will be born.
Perhaps this is the unavoidable price Microsoft has to pay for the sins of Internet Explorers past. But it still feels backwards. Standards mode should be the default. If someone desperately needs the old broken behavior, that should require the special switch. Otherwise we’re not moving the web forward. We’re just giving the ghosts a nicer room to haunt.
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