Discuss: From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey
by Eric Meyer
- Editorial Comments
22 Special Treatment
A few people have asked why we’re treating Microsoft specially, or words to that effect. What I tried very hard to do was evaluate the proposal on its merits, not on its source. I believe I’d have had the same reactions, and come to the same conclusions, had the proposal come from the W3C, the Opera team, the WaSP, or anyone else. That was one of the things I asked myself constantly as I considered the idea: would my thinking here change if the source hadn’t been Microsoft?
posted at 05:54 pm on January 22, 2008 by Eric Meyer
23 The mark of a professional
Eric, in comment #8 you say “but practicing forward-compatible development will continue to be the mark of a true professional.”
my question here is: why? at the end of the day, how would this professionalism show, to the end user? if you can code for the moment and effectively instruct browsers to freeze their behaviour and display to their current interpretation, now and in future, what is the advantage of, or even sense in, forward-compatible dev?
posted at 06:01 pm on January 22, 2008 by patrick lauke
24 Forward-compatible development
Patrick,
The switch only targets IE. All other browsers are unaffected. We cannot order any browser but IE to freeze. And for all practical purposes IE has been frozen for quite a while, until the release of IE7. It’s hardly a new situation.
As far as I can see the advantages of forward compatibility remain the same as always. The versioning switch is a tool for ensuring backward compatibility. It says little about forward compatibility.
Frankly, I don’t understand the argument that the switch will kill forward compatibility. It will only if we let it—and why should we?
posted at 06:11 pm on January 22, 2008 by Peter-Paul Koch
25 Other browsers shows standards mode by default. Wh
There is no cure for backwards compatibility, web sites will break. It’s the only way to move forward.
This means no new Doctype, no new Meta Type, no Conditional Comments, no more IE propriety code. If IE8 is any where near standard compliant, let it render in standard mode the same as all other browsers.
I see that IE8 is going to have Conditional Comments?
http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2007/12/19/not-that-you-need-me-to-tell-you-this.aspx#7197568
IE8 is an layout engine without hasLayout. What happens when IE8 in standard mode encounters this CSS.
<!—[if gte IE7]>
<style type=“text/css”>
#container {height:1%}
</style>
<![endif]—>
How many sites will now break in IE8 or a greater version in the future? How many pages does a developer have to change because they used this type of hack in the HTML?
A <!DOCTYPE> proceeding the <html> allows this CSS *+html to target IE7. Why does this happen? Why can any comment appearing in the HTML be selected by IE7?
Could it be that this happens because IE7 is looking for <! and > already, ie. <!—[if IE]>.
As I have already suggested elsewhere how IE8 can by default be in standard mode and have an op-in for IE7 mode.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Dec/0191.html
No sites will break unless IE8 standard mode is not standard compliant.
posted at 06:13 pm on January 22, 2008 by Alan Gresley
26 RE: CHANGE OVER TIME
A whole lot of breakage did occur, because the fraction of web developers doing true forward-compatible development is pretty small. This has always been true. It’s always going to be true.
This fatalistic attitude is sad, because I believe that the efforts of WaSP, ALA etc. have played a massive part in increasing that proportion — you seem to be losing hope, just when we’ve hit the mainstream.
Don’t you think that seeing breakage in a poorly coded site is part of the learning process for people who make websites? And we have beta versions of new browsers to test with, don’t we? (Further, any IE7-caused breakage has already happened, so the damage is done. Surely IE7-IE8 won’t be such a drastic change?)
I strongly suspect that Microsoft’s target IE8-breakable site either doesn’t work in any other browser, or uses extensive hacks. Giving that developer an easy way out isn’t helping anyone.
posted at 06:16 pm on January 22, 2008 by Jonathan Kahn
27 modules and embedded content
How will components that get plugged into pages handle this header setting? For example, a javascript library that needs to work around browser specific bugs. Will the library be able to find out what compatibility mode the browser is in?
Same issue with a web service that’s including html in a page via ajax. Currently these components can look at the user agent – will the user agent include compatibility mode information?
posted at 06:21 pm on January 22, 2008 by Joseph Davis
28 Untitled
Alan Gresley: Considering no other browser in the history of the web has ever been completely standards-compliant, why should we expect IE8 to be?
(I’m not talking abstract corner-cases here; I’ve had to work around bugs in every browser)
posted at 06:22 pm on January 22, 2008 by David Smith
29 Go Howard!!!
Howard Fine above has the best point so far. Why is it that we keep looking for a way to let Microsoft and IE off the hook when they should be trying to keep up with US instead?
Isn’t that the point of the standards movement? Shouldn’t we be encourage vendors to create browsers that adhere to the spec sheet more accurately and cause sites that were built incorrectly to break? (By “incorrectly” I mean that it was built with proprietary hacks and browser specific style sheets)
Aren’t we encouraging an internet that looks more and more like a collection of bad MySpace pages when we allow people use WYSIWYG builders that will lock down their code and never analyze it again?
Nothing angers me more than Conditional Comments when I see page code. If you can’t build it right, why bother?
Of course after saying all that, admittedly, developers can’t even seem to agree on a CSS 2 and 2.1 spec to begin with. The CSS2 recomendation was back in May 1998 and CSS 2.1 wasn’t until July 2007? That’s worse than IE6 to IE7… yikes!
posted at 06:36 pm on January 22, 2008 by Douglas Tondro
30 One standard is better
Besides which, we’ve written enough scripts and hacks to make our pages adjust to browsers. Isn’t it about time browsers started adjusting to our pages?
Adjusting based on what criteria? How are browsers supposed to know what we “meant” by a piece of HTML code? Answer: check the standards. Authors and browsers must both follow the standard, then there is no “adjusting” to be done.
The proposed Meta element switch is just like tags in Microsoft’s OOXML such as “autoSpaceLikeWord95” or “useWord97LineBreakRules”. These are meaningless without the source code.
It would be terrible to fragment the web again into pages targeted via their Meta elements to various browsers. We would be back to browsers having to emulate the bugs of other browsers.
posted at 06:37 pm on January 22, 2008 by Liam Morland
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21 missing META and lock-in
I understand the argument that any documents that are missing the new meta data should be rendered with IE6 (or is it 7), but the problem is that when those pages were built, the expectation was that when a newer rendering engine is released, the page would render with the new engine. In other words, these pages have not been “locked-in” by the developer, therefore the browser should not assume the they were intended to be “locked-in”.
So, how do we handle all the pages that will “break” with the new engine? When the new engine is releases, tell the developers/maintainers of those sites to add the Meta tag to their pages(or even easier have the server add the http header to all outgoing pages). Yeah, they still have to scramble to fix their broken sites, but the scramble is much easier and they can either be done with it, or update their code latter when they have the time. Besides, for the most part, the only people who are scrambling are those who were ignoring web standards anyway.
This way, we only get “lock-in” when we explicitly ask for it. That’s much better in my opinion. It also negates the need for the whole “edge” thing.
posted at 05:53 pm on January 22, 2008 by Waylan Limberg