11 A lot of thinking to do

I have got a whole lot of thinking to do on this matter, including reading both articles over again (probably several times). This deserves a well thought out reponse, thanks Eric for providing it on this occasion, making for an interesting and balanced ALA.

I won’t hide the fact that my initial thoughts are negative, but this is already something we will have to deal with come IE8. My initial concerns are for those who code to the standards and implement progressive enhancement, those who’s sites did not break, rather improved, when IE upgraded to 7.

I’ll be back, once I’ve thought some more.

posted at 03:19 pm on January 22, 2008 by Phil Nash

12 Sceptical about 'breaking the web'

Still, we need to be honest about this. We’re not reaching everyone, and probably never will. Some sites will be developed according to what the browser-of-the-moment does, no matter how incorrect that might be in comparison to a specification or even other browsers’ behaviours.

Eric, you lost me here. You seem to have bought the Microsoft sob story about all their most important customers only using clueless web developers, making better standards support business suicide. If this really is the case, then what about web standards?

Do we really want to support a new (proprietary?) syntax that actually enshrines user-agent-specific markup? Seems like an official stamp of approval for hacking it together in IEx, not checking in any other browser, and not even thinking about accessibility etc.

Microsoft is scared of newly compliant browsers (like IE7) breaking their clients’ sites — but surely this generally indicates that the sites work fine in Firefox, Safari etc., and the IE-specific hacks are causing problems for IE7?

I remember you talking at An Event Apart Philly about supporting the yet-to-be-released IE7 — you said should behave like Firefox, so as long as you were careful about a couple of now-broken IE hacks you would be fine (which in my experience was a spot-on prediction.) What changed?

posted at 03:39 pm on January 22, 2008 by Jonathan Kahn

13 How do other browsers feel about this?

This sounds like a good idea to me, but before it becomes canon, I would like to know how other browser vendors feel about it?

Also what would happen if you stated the page should be rendered in IE7 but a user only has IE6? Are we still back where we were before then?

I think the problem most developers and designers have with this is they are more than happy to update their old IE specific code, if IE fully supported standards like other browsers do.

Honestly the only real solution to everything is to have 1 rendering engine, 1 JavaScript interpreter, 1 CSS interpreter for ALL browsers, and just have a different front end for each browser. That is the only true solution to the mess…either that or only have 1 browser for all.

posted at 04:04 pm on January 22, 2008 by Neal G

14 This really does break all that we've been fightin

This really does break all that we’ve been fighting for…

We are now in a point where you actually can build a website that renders correctly across all major browsers. We should go forward with this, not backwards. We should try to elimiate altogether conditional comments and hacks.

We need clear standards, and DOCTYPES for HTML versioning. Nothing more… if some vendors get them wrong, they will fix it, or they’ll lose they’re clients.

From a marketing point of view this would really, and i mean REALLY slow down the progress of the web

posted at 04:06 pm on January 22, 2008 by Andrei Eftimie

15 Show Us Your Meta

Eric, If, today, this META scheme were adopted by all browsers, what would your META tag look like?

How would that page be interpreted and rendered by a not-yet-created browser five years from now? And can we specify different versions on different platforms? (eg. IE5 Mac vs IE6 Windows)?

Perhaps if I saw something concrete it would help me decide if this scheme is something I want to support.

posted at 04:34 pm on January 22, 2008 by Carl Camera

17 Here we go again. Another hack

Why are we, again, having to fix the web for Microsoft. Shouldn’t Microsoft be fixing itself for the standard web? Why are we treating Microsoft as a charity case?

posted at 05:16 pm on January 22, 2008 by howard fine

19 More Specifically...

Thanks, Eric, but more specifically what META would you recommend for sites such as A List Apart or An Event Apart — sites that want to serve a wide audience? If I were to view the source of this page under the premise above, what would that META tag be?

posted at 05:38 pm on January 22, 2008 by Carl Camera

20 If something like this must be done...

…then using a date, as Ben Sekulowicz and others have suggested, would be far preferable.

As it stands, my standards-compliant website, which IE7 renders incorrectly, would never be rendered correctly by any future version of IE (a concept that only makes sense if you assume that any unlabelled page was designed for IE7).

Using a date, however, I’d be able to say “yes, I updated this page in 2010—I’m well aware that IE8 exists: render it properly, pleaseâ€?.

Those who insist on clinging to the past would be more likely to realise they were doing so if they had to include <foo bar=“2008-01-01”> in their pages to make them look right. Clients who inspected their designers’ code could say “how come this page says ‘2008’?—it’s 2013!â€?, to which the only sensible response would be “I designed this for browsers that use 2008 technologyâ€?.

I suspect (from reading the comments here) that there’d be much less resistance from standards-concerned web developers to an explicit “last-modernisedâ€? date than to an explicit browser version; and I can’t see any drawback from Microsoft’s perspective for using dates instead of versions.

Though nothing should be necessary, I understand MS’s concerns about backwards compatibility. So, I oppose using versions and advocate using dates.

posted at 05:41 pm on January 22, 2008 by Greg Nicholson

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