81 I think it all sounds fine to me ...

Sounds to me like this solution will:

a) Put control back in the hands of developers
b) Remove the panic of ‘Uh-oh, this site could break! Quick! Find the solution before the client calls-up and complains!’

Dog wagging tail, rather than tail wagging dog …

posted at 09:14 pm on January 22, 2008 by Kev Adamson

82 Who is "our group"?

Another clarification in your article which I think might be nice is on who this “our group” is who recommended this solution to MS.
You write:
“Unwilling to make the same mistake twice, Microsoft reached out to The Web Standards Project (of which I am a member) and to several other standards-aware developers, and asked for our help in coming up with a better method of allowing developers to “opt inâ€? to proper standards support.”
and
“This is exactly what our group decided to recommend for IE8, and we hope to see it implemented in other browsers as well.”

But that ‘our group’ very much isn’t the whole of the Web Standards Project, as for example Andy Clarke writes :
“Just to be clear Anne, the members of the Web Standards Project in general were not informed about this article and Microsoft’s proposal/plans”

posted at 09:18 pm on January 22, 2008 by Sander van Lambalgen

83 One step forward, two steps back

I have tried to explain to myself why opt-in would be a good thing. I can’t convince myself. Everytime a new browser or browser version appears, I need to change my web pages telling the browser it should render the page against it’s latest engine, otherwise it won’t do that automatically.

Why is the meta tag introduced? To give developers an opportunity to ‘grade back’ once they have discovered a fatal flaw that they were unable to fix, in other words when the browser introduced something that has broken an existing web standard. I mean, surely, after all these years of fighting and WaSPing, no browser vendor would even think to introduce a new browser that breaks existing standards? Right?

If there was a down-grade meta tag introduced in IE8, I could understand that Microsoft would have a solution in place for a quick-fix to their (corporate) clients. That is fine, I do not have any objection to that. In case of IE7 that triggered this whole idea: if IE7 would have had a down-grade ‘render as IE6’ option, that could also be served up by the webserver in the header, that’s great. That’s a real world solution to real world problems.

Now, Microsoft is putting a price tag on innovation to its customers: if you want to progress, alter your meta tags first, otherwise it won’t work.

posted at 09:26 pm on January 22, 2008 by Martijn ten Napel

84 Let's not prolong the pain please...

One of the biggest mistakes of the web development community was to struggle to try and make sites work on old or buggy browsers.

You see, we’re all really determined to give our end-users the best experience possible, even if it causes us vast amounts of pain trying to hack around Internet Exploder to try and convince it to do things properly.

But our efforts have backfired on us. By supporting buggy browsers, we’ve actually prolonged the life of the buggy browsers and the sites that came to rely on those buggy browsers.

If we resolutely stop supporting browsers with bugs, across the board, guess what will happen… People will stop using buggy browsers because all the sites they visit will be “broken”.

That in turn will make people with sites that break on standards-compliant browsers wake up and think “hey, I need to fix my site … now!”. It’s not going to take as long as you think for the world to adapt to a standards compliant nirvana.

Do you think that a big online shop will find their pages breaking on all new browsers and say “no, this is not acceptable, I want the browsers to still work like they did when they were full of bugs” or do you think they will frantically get developers in to fix their broken site? Just a hunch, but I’m guessing the latter will happen if they want to sell stuff.

So, let’s do away with this bonkers idea of “yet more IE-specific cruft” (and no, saying that you can put other UAs in the meta tag is not going to fool us) and the utterly absurd notion of keeping broken sites on life support for the rest of time.

Let’s just make IE8 standards compliant, like all the other browsers, and lets have regular updates (at least twice a year) to fix known bugs.

Think of how this would affect the web community. I’d write my site once and only have to worry about fixing bugs in my site, not the browser. If the browser used to view the site is broken, then the person using that broken browser will be seeing lots of “broken” sites. They’re going to realise it’s not the sites that are broken, but their browser. That’s going to be a rather good incentive to upgrade to a browser that isn’t broken.

If all the browsers suddenly adhered to open standards (oh, they already do, with one notable exception), do you think anyone anywhere would actually start demanding their bug-dependant site be catered for, and if they did do you think anyone would even waste time listening to them? Do you think people would still visit broken bug-dependant websites or use broken web browsers any more?

So, rather than creating yet another feedback cycle of massively time-wasting problems, create a feedback cycle of time-saving solutions – a scenario where everyone moves, with strong and growing incentive, to open standards compliance.

What Micro$oft are doing with this meta tag switch is the complete opposite – they are trying really hard to make people move away from standards.

Yet, at the same time, it also signals that even Micro$oft have realised that standards support is a “must have” requirement in their browser. Why prolong the pain? Let’s just get this over and done with. Move to standards compliance by default, now, without hesitation.

As a web developer, I’m not prepared to keep wasting 60% of each major project on “making it work in IE” and I’m sure as hell not going to implement anything that prolongs the existence of broken sites and broken browsers.

The entire web development community needs to come together and say “enough is enough, make IE standards compliant by default, even if it breaks some crappy sites which in turn will get fixed by their owners or be doomed to obscurity, or we’re no longer going to support IE, even if it has the market share”.

In the coming weeks, the company I work for will be announcing new pricing. We will be developing standards compliant sites for reduced cost. We will be charging extra to then make those standards compliant sites work on IE. As more and more companies take this approach, large enterprises (which we term “IE bug nests”) will quickly see just how much more IE is costing them and how much they’ll save by using the free alternatives like FF or Opera.

Micro$oft, please understand quite clearly: It is not you who are in charge of the web development community any more. We are in charge of you. You don’t get to tell us to implement what is obviously yet another IE hack, just so that you can prolong your monopoly. You will make your browser standards compliant by default, without cludges and hacks, if you want us to support your browser. While you’re at it, “End of Life” IE6 and everything before it, publicly stating that “Microsoft are joining the move to a standards-compliant Internet”. Thanks.

posted at 09:54 pm on January 22, 2008 by Guy Fraser

85 Options

I think it’s great. I can see problems with it, sure. But there will always be some bump in the road. The main reason why I think it is good is that you have options. You could specify a certain browser. Then when a new one comes out you can go back and test it. If it fails then you can either fix the code so that it will work on the new browser. Or just say the heck with it and keep it connected with a specific browser. Having an option doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me.

posted at 09:57 pm on January 22, 2008 by Aaron Payne

86 To quote Jeremy Keith....

To quote Jeremy Keith :

Unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7.

Ciao!

posted at 10:14 pm on January 22, 2008 by Christian Holtje

87 Yeah, but ...

Unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7.

When put like that, it does sound like nonsense, but, in reality, isn’t what’s actually be said?:

“If you’ve tested your site and everything displays as it should in IE8, then go ahead and render it in IE8, otherwise, lets just leave things as they are until you’re good and ready to test and ‘fix’ things. That way you don’t get an ear-bashing off your non-web-savvy boss and / or client”

posted at 11:03 pm on January 22, 2008 by Kev Adamson

88 Broken by design

The general idea of a standard is that a specification provides a common interface description against which everyone may implement, without fear or favour. Yet this proposal special-cases a particular implementation. It differentiates between HTML for IE8 from HTML for other user agents. This is not a standard, at best it’s a fork.

This approach is broken by design. It is likely to lead to a situation worse than traditional cross-browser compatibility problems because there’s absolutely no motivation for any vendor to follow (real) standards.

posted at 11:14 pm on January 22, 2008 by Danny Ayers

90 More from Mozilla

Another Mozilla response: Meta Madness

Choice quote: “What happens when you use importNode across iframes that have different DOM versions?”

posted at 11:20 pm on January 22, 2008 by Sander van Lambalgen

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