101 How about programming to the standards?

The standards should be leading. That’s the whole idea of standards.

Microsoft is changing slowly, but they seem to be stuck in their way of thinking.

Years ago I read a statement from Microsoft about one of their technologies (ADO or so): they guaranteed that the way the standard was implemented was considered the right way. At the time I was already baffled. Even though I should know Microsoft by now, they keep surprising me with tricks like these.

The real solution is that:

1. Microsoft stays closely to the standards, takes more care to avoid bugs and fixes them quickly, in this way really promoting writing to the standards;

1. Microsoft gives a reasonable amount of time (months) to developers to make sure their sites work with the upcoming new version of IE. Just remain in beta/release candidate stage for a while.

I know my comment is not adding that much, but the main goal here is to clearly show that most web developers think this proposal should be binned.

posted at 12:58 am on January 23, 2008 by Ernst de Haan

102 Opt-in to Standards? How about Opt-out?

Call me crazy, but this idea seems absolutely insane. Those who have developed their websites to the standards should not be punished by made to feel like second-class citizens on IE— it does not foster a greater push for standardization, but rather poses an incentive to rely on IE’s broken rendering.

Personally, it would make much more sense to allow a meta tag that opted out of using proper standards— if you have an old website that you know works in IE 6 or whatever, and you’re too lazy to update it to the standards, why not put a meta tag that in effect says “use the IE 6 rendering engine on this page?”

In this way, you don’t trivialize the importance of standardization, yet still preserve backwards compatibility for the lazier among us. Just a thought.

posted at 01:06 am on January 23, 2008 by Matt Patenaude

103 Cannot Break the Web Strategy

I can understand Microsoft’s commitment to support legacy content that was built by Microsoft products for Microsoft browsers and the industry that was created around it. Sooner or later, they will have to abandon it. If in the interim, standards compliant content has to opt-in for standards support in IE8, so what. This carries a caveat — It must provide that the burden of opt-in is eventually placed upon legacy content to opt-in for a quirks mode support with an eventual abandonment of all opt-in options.

The question in my mind is whether or not Microsoft has the intent and desire for planned abandonment of the “cannot break the Web” strategy. If Microsoft can earnestly announce such a medium to long term strategy, much of this blog chatter would diminish.

posted at 01:08 am on January 23, 2008 by C Thacker

104 MS Does It Again.

Because MS screwed up the DocType, now we all have to pay.

posted at 01:40 am on January 23, 2008 by Phill Kenoyer

105 Time stamp

Instead of targetting certified user agent versions – of which noone can test all, esp. after some generations – via an opt-in+out switch, the selection, if deemed necessary at all, should be based on release dates, not bound to a browser maker.

If browser A fetches a document with stylesheets and scripts, maybe images too, that are all older than one day, i.e. probably not generated on the (cached) fly, A can render them with the engine A.x that was current at the date of the oldest or newest (depends on philosophy) resource. One could then add opt-in or opt-out switches (again, philosophy) based on that, e.g. “X-Rendering-Certified: 2008-01-23� (probably rather with the awful, US-biased HTTP date format, or keywords ‘weekly’, ‘never’). This way the author is responsible for checking all rendering engines (he wants to / must support) at the given date, but does not need to list them explicitly. He can give a date in the past of course, if he hasn’t updated his code to work with more recent browser versions. It’s also more of a meta data than a command approach.

posted at 01:50 am on January 23, 2008 by Christoph Päper

106 Updating Sites...

Why is it that, despite everything we know about the mutability of the web, people still want to make a site and expect it to last and be relevant for years to come?

I don’t see many companies making print ads, or book covers, and then letting them sit and reprinting every so often – that stuff gets redesigned, or refitted to a new generation with new needs.

Standards are wonderful, because they assure that we’re going to have things rendered (hopefully) mostly the same way for the current generation of what we’re using (let’s say XHTML and CSS2).

When a new XHTML or CSS comes along, we go through and we should be going through and changing what no longer works as well, or converting to new ways of doing things that simplify the old site.

Not only all that, but that’s kinda how designers and developers will have job security, as well.

Just $.02 from a young, angsty designer/developer.

posted at 01:53 am on January 23, 2008 by Rodrigo Casitllo

107 This would have gone down much better if...

the article had gone something like: “Ok, MS messed it up big time by not implementing web standards correctly since the beginning and now they’re afraid to make things worse for people who don’t know enough about standards if all of a sudden IE 8 implements them the way they should be.”

“So they got together with a bunch of us to try to come up with a solution but the best thing we could come up with was a hack. We would have liked more, but there were also MS corporate interests to consider and we thought that some concession would be better than nothing.”

But just trying to pass this as “the best solution” wakes up the cynic in all of us.

posted at 03:10 am on January 23, 2008 by Roberto Baca

108 Why not UA "Features" instead of UA "Versions"?

Perhaps I’m being naive here, but it seems to me a better solution would be to come up with a way for a document to declare to the UA what “features” it is planning to use, rather than saying what “version of behaviour” it wants the browser to emulate. In my mind, I’m picturing something like:

<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Features” content=“dataUrls;[removed]version=1.8;generatedContent;fallBack:renderAsIE7” />

Maybe I’m over-engineering, but it seems like this would be smarter than pinning to a UA version.

posted at 03:13 am on January 23, 2008 by Joey Smith

109 Is this for real? It's just so stupid..

I’ve been programming for 20 years, and the first “user interface” (layout-based) applications I wrote was “BBS-doors” for MAXsBBS on the Amiga platform.

If we use this same scenario, and date it back then, that would mean that if I today wrote “MAXsBBS=door” in this stupid tag my browser, which in reality means ALL browsers, would have a rendering engine (ANSI/VT102 if I remember correctly) for my document. Since we (=the programmers) want and expect this so called “backward compability” to exist. Surely, we do not. We’ve already abandoned the MAXsBBS doors 15 years ago, and are now moving on to other (and better) layout engines.

Why not use this on executable-files aswell? Then we don’t need Java or the other look-alikes “Write-Once-Run-Nowere” frameworks, we just add “X-EXE-FORMAT: C64” to our executable file and fire it up in Windows Vista, and Mac OS X..

Aw, come on.

This is just SO NOT HAPPENING, please!

posted at 03:15 am on January 23, 2008 by Charlie Elgholm

110 Sorry not for me

allowing developers to “opt in� to proper standards support.

Think of email. Think of spam. “Opt in”? Sorry, “opt out”. Ok!

As for the rest of the argument. It’s not hard to say “my gut tells me it’s wrong and I trust my gut”, but I’m also in the position of saying that I honestly don’t have any better solutions to offer.

posted at 04:56 am on January 23, 2008 by John Bertucci

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