Discuss: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

by Aaron Gustafson

91 Patronising Uncle

Zeldman: “I love Jeremy. You’ve got to love Jeremy. …”

Jeffrey, you should tone down the Old Patronising Uncle persona a little – it may not be suitable for a Hot Potato subject like this one. Especially when you’re in the ‘wrong’ camp.

posted at 01:43 am on January 23, 2008 by David One

While this evades DOCTYPE, it doesn’t address the more fundamental issue: separate rendering standards for different browsers (or worse yet — individual versions of those browsers) are not standards at all. A standard should change the way things are, not the other way around.

That said, achieving compatibility with older browsers is a tough job, and sometimes you have to get dirty to clean things up. That’s why I hope to see this used judiciously, for the benefit of nonstandard browsers only. I think back with fondness to the days when the first line of my HTML document read, very simply:

<HTML>

That’s what I call a standard.

posted at 01:58 am on January 23, 2008 by Daniel Delaney

93 Major concerns

I’ve been thinking about this for hours now. I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand the reasoning behind this. With learned colleagues like Zeldman, Meyer and Koch supporting this feature, I simply must look at it with an open mind. But at the end of the day, my opinion hasn’t changed from earlier today. These things give me great concern:

Browser footprint – supporting an increasing number of legacy renderings will bloat the software. How can this work on mobile devices where disk space is so limited?
Browser footprint2 – and what of the CPU resources?
Tabs and frames – what happens when many tabs are open with different rendering systems being used in each? And what happens with Objects, IFRAMEs and other frameset arrangements that may mix the different rendering systems?
Security – since the system will be forced to run older, and less secure rendering systems, will this create massive security holes? Will hackers be able to use older exploits, hiding their work in nests of different rendering systems?
Future standards – what incentive will developers have to adhere to modern standards, other than more proprietary features from Microsoft? Lazy developers can remain in the past.
W3C – what has the World Wide Web Consortium to say about all this? Is the consortium happy that Microsoft want to fix their mess with another new, non-standard feature to go along with “conditional comments”?

DOM – is this going to make an awful mess? Nested/embedded rendering systems will be able mess with each other’s DOMs – including any layout-related DOMmery.

No. I think this is a disaster. I’m actually sad about it. Is this how Americans felt after JFK was killed?

posted at 02:17 am on January 23, 2008 by Simon Jessey

94 So much for standards.

Snore.

I thought you guys were standards advocates, not Microsoft shrills. Every other browser is able to render pages according to the spec, or close enough. IE requires a special tag to do so. You guys congratulate them. Hah, what a sell out.

IE is introducing a third option to quirksmode with this change. More options, more problems. The only people that benefit here are the MS shareholders.

We may as well call IE8 -> IE6.2, because essentially, that’s what we have: one more browser that can’t support a known standard.

I’ve got a better option, I’ll just ignore everything MS releases, design for standards, and tell users to download a real browser.

posted at 02:18 am on January 23, 2008 by not worth it

95 Untitled

I think it’s a great idea. I’m going to quote someone else to reiterate why:

“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”

The only downside is that it provides less “oh my god” motivation for a business to update their pages to the latest browser version.

But I definitely think it’s better than the 2 approaches we’re stuck with now:
1. Have existing pages that no one is maintaining break when a new browser version comes out.
2. In the name of backwards compatibility, refuse to change anything in the browser because it would break existing pages.

Bob hires me to create a small static site to promote his business. I do it, and move on to another gig. It only makes sense that when a new browser comes out that his page still work since he hasn’t changed it.

I’m excited by the idea that newer versions of the browser will be able to fix bugs without worrying about backwards compatibility.

posted at 02:34 am on January 23, 2008 by Paul Rivers

96 Yet again, Microsoft is allowed to run rampant ove

I can’t believe that anyone would conceivably allow a platform specific enhancement to be added to a standard because an old version of software wasn’t patched.

Point 1
Microsoft should have done things right the first time and implemented the standard as it was written. Without trying to second guess the development community.

However, this isn’t the first time MS has done something like this. The last time they did something that IMHO was this brain-dead, they violated a licensing agreement between them and Sun. The result of that situation, regardless of the MS FUD is now known as C#.

Before that, it was the successive changes between RDO, DAO, and ADO for developers. Then COM and DCOM and ASP.

Microsoft is forever trying to force changes to standards or rewriting standards to suit themselves, then forcing them onto the rest of the world and until their back is to the wall, they will continue to do this. Someone needs to stand up and say “NO!”

Point 2
As for the need to support UA changes from browser version to browser version, someone indicated that if the UA from IE-8 to IE-9 doesn’t change, there’s no new UA to support.

While this is correct, that doesn’t preclude a developer from putting:

into their code and effectively breaking it without meaning to.

Conclusion
There is absolutely no reason for doing something this bass-ackwards to make up for one product that was orphaned and then brought back to life.

Heck, if Microsoft is explicitly not going to support older formats of Office documents (of which there are far more than the number of web pages in existence), then why bother changing a standard to support older formats of “Bad/Non-Standard MS HTML Coding Practices”

posted at 02:43 am on January 23, 2008 by Eric Smith

97 Untitled

P.S. I don’t think the naysayers have thought through the positive aspects of this, either. Right now my work forces me to use IE6 because “that’s what our web pages are written for”. I don’t like their decision, but they pay the bills, so that’s what I do.

But imagine that I could upgrade to IE7 and all the IE6 pages would still work right. I could upgrade my browser today! Pretty soon, everyone would have upgraded their browsers (rather than using the crappy old version “for compatibility reasons”). Within a year of a new browser coming out, 90% of IE users would be using IE7. Now I could tell management “90% of our users are using IE7 – let’s drop support for IE6 and only write new pages for IE7”.

That would be fantastic.

posted at 02:43 am on January 23, 2008 by Paul Rivers

98 Draw the line

[Quote] 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�?.[End Quote]

Precisely. Enough is enough. This Meta idea is completely back to front.

Microsoft need to admit the mess they’ve made, take the bull by the horns, use their considerable advertising power to tell people IE8 will be fully standards compliant. Inform them they have six months to either make the site compliant or add a Meta tag to say that it isn’t.

Old sites should be adding the Meta, not new compliant sites. If we don’t draw the line now then this will just go on and on with Microsoft making excuse after excuse.

posted at 02:46 am on January 23, 2008 by Gill Lucraft

99 Untitled

“Microsoft should have done things right the first time and implemented the standard as it was written. Without trying to second guess the development community.”

A number of people have written this, but an emotional issue overlying a logical one. Initial implementations of standards can be flawed, and sometimes a new standard unintentionally breaks the old one.

For example – why is it that Firefox2 didn’t “just implement Acid2 in the first place”?

posted at 02:46 am on January 23, 2008 by Paul Rivers

100 Message for Paul Rivers

A lot of people have been taking your view, however, I would ask that you consider an alternate which should still give the same results you seek:

Why don’t they make IE8 be standards-compliant by default (it’s not caused problems with all the other browsers has it?) and have a meta (hack!) tag that says “run as IE7” for bug-dependant sites?

A great number of sites that work on IE7 will already work on IE8. Some might need subtle CSS changes (ie. wholesale removal of hacks) and the really bad offenders can beg for IE7 with the hack tag.

This would:

reduce the number of sites that need the hack tag, as I dare say the vast majority will just continue to work
clearly flag bug-dependant websites for all browsers, allowing all browsers to be standards-compliant by default

let the site owner know that they are falling behind the rest of the world, but give them plenty of time to address that issue

I think free software would appear very quickly to add the “beg for IE7 hack” to all HTML files in a folder structure and any form of CMS can very quickly be tweaked to add it in as well.

There are a finite number of existing web pages on the internet. There are an infinite number of future web pages that will appear for the rest of time. Why is the hack tag being imposed on the latter when it would only be needed on a fraction of the former?

posted at 02:46 am on January 23, 2008 by Guy Fraser