A List Apart Comments for Article: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

Other Browser Support

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:33:55 GMT

I think this is fabulous idea. One more way to get around buggy implementations. Have you been in contact with other UAs concerning Version Targeting, or only Microsoft?

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I have to say... I can't agree.

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:09:33 GMT

I understand the need for us a web developers and designers to be able to "set it, and forget it" but I really think that the best option is the one we have now. The one that doesn't lock us into any given version of a browser and keeps us honest with our code. I am fearful of the possibility that companies stop thinking about how to offer improved accessibility, usability, and functionality buy building a site that is IE7 compliant and then leaving it for the next 10 years, bugs and all. The current method almost requires companies to keep up with the times, or at least make an effort to give their users a better web. The web needs to be able to "shed it's skin" every ten or so years and get rid of some of that old, unmanaged, outdated code. How many people are going to miss those old Yahoo!Geocities sites anyway?

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Worst solution ever

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:21:34 GMT

OMG! That's a terrible solution and impossible to implement. That would mean that if I wanted to create a browser, I would have to emulate the rendering behavior of all other browsers. That's just so absurd. Rendering and behavior should be standards based, not browser based. Microsoft would like that solution because it is anti-competitive and would cause significant problems for the rest of the industry (everyone else would have to attempt to emulate IE 5,6,7,8,N's rendering behavior as Microsoft are the dominant player). In fact, this solution is even unsustainable for Microsoft because it would make their codebase huge as they keep all their bugs forever in their browsers. Stupid solution. I don't see it happening.

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@Marcos Caceres

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:33:58 GMT

I don't believe this solution would require Firefox to implement an IE rendering model. Since Firefox would be targeted by the FF abbreviation. I am not convinced about this solution either though. I welcome the attempt to bring some sort of order to all this. However, I can't see Opera (or whoever) in 5 years time delivering an Opera 15 with 5 different rendering engines for versions from 10 to 14! In any case this will only work if all browsers agree on this convention and I just can't see that happening.

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I... I'm not sure

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:47:50 GMT

I'm not sure this is a good idea. I find it hard to believe that browsers will render pages correctly in backwards-compatibility modes. Heck, *most* browsers are inherently buggy and laying bugs on top of other bugs is a recipe for failure. To handle the past for *those* browsers we already have IE conditional comments, right?

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Versioning is the opposite of standardisation.

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:27:53 GMT

It's inevitable that standards change, eventually making light switches, office buildings and webpages obsolete. When products in that state still ought to be useful to a broader market, they should be renewed or replaced. so I agree with Douglas Tondro: site owners have to continuously invest in standards compliant web content. They shouldn't leave that to other parties like their audience or any browser manufacturer. In a industry that wants to take itself seriously, site managers are responsible for keeping pages up to date and browser manufacturers are responsible for prevailing standards above the little and big innovations they're longing for. Any mechanism for versioning will be bad for the process of becoming a standard compliant industry.

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I'm not convinced

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:08:19 GMT

I'm ready to agree with Marcos Caceres, this is really a terrible solution and nothing I would like to see in future browsers. This will only lead to extremely bloated browsers with thousand of render modes and a web full of ugly and unmaintained sites.

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Untitled

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:27:09 GMT

There's a big case of weasel words in this article. While it's fair to say that IE8 in standards mode renders Acid2 correctly, that's completely not equivalent to 'passing Acid2'. Passing Acid2 requires the browser to render http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html correctly, and I don't see any meta tags on there.

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Oh God, Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children?!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:27:43 GMT

This sounds like the same half-assed approach that lead to the DOCTYPE switch in the first place. In an environment with a potentially unlimited set of UAs to access pages on the Internet, how can anyone think it's a good idea to UA hardcode support information into the document? If you want to render my document, there is a defined set of standards. If you aren't up to implementing those standards then make your own excuses, don't expect me to update my document to suit. Now, I understand that this is a fundamentalist view and in "the real world" there are "allowances" that should be made. But something along the lines of what is being suggested here is just going to make the web less document-centric, and more about the "big" browsers. And here's a hint - the focus of the web should be the content, not the viewer.

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Um...?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:21:40 GMT

So we're reinventing browser sniffing? Great, being an opera user, I'm going to be so thrilled with that, when people specify IE8, FF3, and then some lower number for everything else because they can't be arsed with other browsers. So I get some crappy version when I run Opera? Maybe Opera will have some sense and just ignore it. Browser sniffing wasn't good the first time round, many of us spent a lot of time giving people reasons why browser sniffing wasn't bad, and now here we are, saying it's the best way forward? As GarethAdams says, there are potentially an unlimited number of UA's, what are we going to do about mobile browsers? How about Flock, or other browsers that use the Gecko engine? This sounds like a complete cave in to MS' demands, when they should be doing everything possible to bend over backwards to get this stuff right, they got themselves into this position, they need to get themselves out of it, without forcing web developers into bad practices.

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A Microsoft-centric solution

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:32:30 GMT

bq. Sure, most trips through the “Wayback Machine” don’t suffer in modern browsers because the DOCTYPE switch still serves them well, but what about a site built to IE6’s implementation of “standards” mode? We already know that, in many cases, IE7 won’t render it properly. Agreed, IE7 won't be able to render it -- but Firefox or Safari will, because the author didn't need to use wholesale hacks and workarounds for these browsers to get the layout to work in the first place. You're proposing a Microsoft-centric solution to a problem that Microsoft created for themselves, by not keeping up with modern browsers post-IE6. That five-year gap produced the millions websites designed just for IE6 -- that Microsoft bosses are desperate to support at all costs. Why is the onus on people who are actually trying to use standards to declare it, rather than on the people who only support obsolete technology like IE6?

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In Defence of Standards Pedantry

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:38:17 GMT

Firstly, if MS can get IE8 to render correctly via me using a meta tag - particularly one other browsers can use - I'll live with that. Their 'not break the web' mantra means that this is about the best we're likely to get from them here, so I'll settle. That's what my head tells me. If there's something new, something that doesn't in itself break standards, I'm prepared to add it to my template. Secondly, like wot Gareth Adams says: "If you want to render my document, there is a defined set of standards. If you aren’t up to implementing those standards then make your own excuses, don’t expect me to update my document to suit." It in my heart it _feels_ like a backward step. But I'm still prepared to give it a go.

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This doesn't feel right

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:55:38 GMT

Maybe this is a difficult concept to grasp but intuitively it doesn't seem like the right thing to do. It seems to be a solution designed solely to support the various versions of Internet Explorer which aren't able to easily co-exist with other browsers (or even themselves). What's really needed is a concerted effort to make front-end web development a recognised profession. This might help to ensure that more developers have sufficient knowledge to overcome the differences between browsers whilst we move to a more standardised rendering situation. After all there doesn't seem to be a problem with Progressive Enhancement when you know what you're doing.

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Declared Interests?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:05:18 GMT

Sounds like you put a reasonable amount of work into this concept, which rather flies in the face of many years of web standards effort. Can I ask if you were paid by Microsoft for this effort, and if so how much?

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Err, we allready have a standard for that...

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:12:56 GMT

Well, as some other people noticed, I think this is not the right move to make. Because every website is already defining how it wants to be rendered. Just take a look at the doctype and you know. There is a good solution; the browser vendors should implement standards as defined by the W3C. So we all know how a browser will render a site. Maybe not in the most smooth way, but you only have to build your site once. This new standard will not be implemented by all browser vendors, so again we will have the problem fixed for only a few browsers. Its just another patch. And by the way, how many MB is Safari for iPhone after 10 new render engines?

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I feel happy

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:34:54 GMT

Not about a browser compatibility declaration, but the fact that Microsoft are concerned about standards compliance and not breaking existing websites. Maybe there's hope for the future after all.

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Re:

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:47:14 GMT

So some people are trying really hard to fight standards, interoperability, and maintainability. I admire the tenacity, but I'm about to lose any motivation to deal with that in a constructive fashion. (Qed.)

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This is not a sustainable solution

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:50:07 GMT

I'm afraid that, on this occasion, I agree with most of the posters on the IEBlog that this is a very regressive step and I think the Webstandards folk really should be ashamed of going along with this. There may have been some layout compat problems when IE7 launched, but the world has not fallen apart, and the IE7 Trident is certainly a major improvement on IE6 Trident. I still don't really see why this metatag 'solution' should be needed. The only sites that are really going to need serious checking of layout are the kind of sites that are done by people who understand CSS and therefore more likely to be actively maintained. People using table tags and other stuff are surely not likely to be affected for the simple reason that IE already implements all of the basics, and the vast majority of CSS stuff to the standards, with only more complex floats and other more complex areas less consistently supported (but again, IE7 Trident got alot of that closer to other browser vendors' implementations). I think we just have to accept within the web development community that some breakage will occur as the web moves on. The same has happened in the security and other arenas. Otherwise we face the bad old world of browser sniffing, which surely we all tried to move away from years ago? And also, how does this solve the issue of maintaining support for older browsers? Do we now have to maintain two copies of a site, one with the meta tag and one without? I'd say the use of the odd CSS hack is far preferable to that kind of situation. I really hope that other browser vendors do not implement that and that the IE team think very seriously again about the consequences of implementing this. Compatibility is important but we have to accept that some breakage CAN occur as the web is a constantly evolving medium, and that people have to accept that.

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Down to the browser developers

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:03:41 GMT

I will be very welcome to see "legacy rendering and scripting engines to display the site as it was intended—well into the future". I hope that The Web Standards Project are able to get this rolled out with IE8, and as Hal Stephenson says it is great to hear that Microsoft are concerned about compliance. I like the consensus though am not happy with adding meta tags to effectively "code fork" the correct rendering of websites that I build.

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Re: Declared Interests

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:04:24 GMT

bq. Can I ask if you were paid by Microsoft for this effort, and if so how much? The Web Standards Project has always been a grassroots, _volunteer_ effort. Members _donate_ their time. They are not paid for it.

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Untitled

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:10:36 GMT

I agree with the majority that this is not the best solution. Moreover, it is likely to be a source of future browser instabilities. However, we are going to have to live with that.

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I like it

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:47:08 GMT

The main problem with browsers and html interpretation has been that IE was bugged, and no one fixed it for a long time. So everyone used it, thought the behaviour they witnessed was normal, and everyone was happy... Until other people came up with browsers that actually performed correctly. But there were so many of those sites that were built wrong, that Microsoft could not do much without breaking compatibility. And with every version that came out, they had to be really careful about what they did, otherwise the world would collapse. So standards were held back because: - IE could not go the 'normal way' easily - people building sites felt bad about writing correct code knowing 70% of the world wouldn't see it right Here is a solution that makes it easier on Microsoft to move towards standards AND also has potential support for legacy browsers. How can this be bad (as long as it's not perverted) ? The argument that companies can't support multiple versions is irrelevant: Microsoft still does it inside IE7 and they're the ones with the biggest stack of bugs. I welcome this idea.

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A variation

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:53:28 GMT

Rather than specifying a particular browser/s to render with, how about specifying a date when the website was known to render correctly across all browsers. Browsers would keep records of when a particular rendering agent was introduced, and render the page according to which engine was used at that date. This method allows all browser developers to support the method and removes any developer specific values.

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Untitled

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:00:21 GMT

bq. So we’re reinventing browser sniffing? Great, being an opera user, I’m going to be so thrilled with that, when people specify IE8, FF3, and then some lower number for everything else because they can’t be arsed with other browsers. So I get some crappy version when I run Opera? Maybe Opera will have some sense and just ignore it. Absolutely. This new proposal would be a disaster for the web, it would be a disaster for the development of web standards and technologies, it would be a disaster for everyone who doesn't use IE or Firefox. New browsers are going to support web standards. No new browser that doesn't will get very far. If even IE is going to support them, we should be in the clear as far as new browsers go. What that means is that any site that is coded to web standards should be fine in new browsers. If you're not relying on bugs and hacks, you won't have a problem. Specifying which browsers get a cutting-edge version of the page is completely the wrong way to go about things. Design the "current" version, using the methods of progressive enhancement - and then ensure that any browsers that are known to not support technologies used get a stripped-down version that they _can_ understand.

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Disastrous

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:04:08 GMT

I am sorry, but this can only be described as _madness_. We are talking about *browser sniffing* and *code forking* here, are we not? Although I appreciate the problem of dealing with legacy web documents, any solution that allows browser vendors to drift away from web standards and do their own thing is wrong, wrong, wrong. bq. That’s because even Eric Meyer can’t predict layout or scripting bugs that may be accidentally introduced by a new browser version. There shouldn't be a need to do that. If a new browser version emerges with such bugs, the developer community should notify the browser vendor so that they can roll out an update that fixes the problems. This kind of feature also opens up the possibility of allowing browsers vendors to start creating device-specific browsers. Already, I see completely unnecessary iPhone-specific sites springing up all over the place - a slap in the face for CSS standards designed to cope with many devices. No. This seems to be something conjured-up for the benefit of Microsoft, and not for the benefit of the web or the developer community.

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IE8 is not a new rendering engine

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:19:29 GMT

_"The IE team began work on a completely new rendering engine for IE8"_ According to Chris Wilson in a recent "interview":http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ie-standards-chris-wilson he states: _"We're not actually building a whole new engine, like the whole - In IE, our component was code-named a long time ago, 'Trident.' It's kind of the rendering engine and the object model and the parser - all of these pieces pushed together."_

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stupid

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:19:56 GMT

This idea is full of fail. How many versions back must a mobile browser keep? Or let's say something renders ugly in version 8.1, like transparency. Would I specify 8.2 and hope it'll get fixed in that version, or would I specify edge and see all my other fixes break in 8.5, or will I specify 8.1 and forever have an ugly site? This will solve one problem for Microsofts introduktion of IE8, and that's it. For me a a developer, this will be just another thing to keep in mind while doing workarounds. And what's next? Specifying 8.1+FIX#14+SP3?

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Bad Idea

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:20:31 GMT

This feels, and I think is, a very bad idea for the reasons mentioned above. The way it's been "revealed", while obviously going against the grain of openly developed standards, feeds into the negative feelings. I, for one, won't welcome our new silly tags like this.

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Preservation

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:25:13 GMT

The problem here center's around preservation of old websites. What I think we have to remember here is that the web is still in its infancy. As it grows, things are going to be lost...that is the nature of not just the web, but any new technology, dating all the way back to written word. As browsers become settled around established standards, this problem will solve itself. In simpler terms, you don't need to throw a Hail Mary in the first quarter when you are down by a field goal. There is still plenty of game left to play, and urgency to solve every problem all at once is only going to hurt us in the long run. On a different angle, I have to also state that in any website, content is king. While I am sure some of us would like our designs to be saved and looked upon by future generations in the same way that we look upon some of the great posters of the 40s and 50s, that is mostly irrelevant as long as users can get to and understand the content. And no matter how much of a disaster any older website comes out in modern browsers, people will figure out a way to get to the content.

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Microsoft don't want to break the web?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:26:10 GMT

They already have! And now they want to fix it by reintroducing browser sniffing? If all you standards guys managed to get wuality time with Microsoft, surely it would've been a lot more beneficial to the web and its future to look them in the eye and say: "You want to fix the mess you've made? Quite simply build IE8 to render standards TO THE LETTER. No interpretation, no second-guessing, just do what the specs say. Everybody else does it, why are you any different?" But of course it's Microsoft and the real reason for all this is simply "but if we do things properly, there will be no reason for our users to stick with our browser, so let's act like we're doing the right thing and perpetuate IE-specific code". You want to make sure everything renders properly on the web? Then make sure all browsers render the specs correctly. You then want to make sure developers use those specs? have browsers block ALL rendering if the DOCTYPE is missing or invalid. No excuses on either side of the fence then.

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backwards compatiblity

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:35:48 GMT

So how will previous versions of browsers handle things when they see a page marked as using a greater version number? How will IE8 handle a page that is marked as IE9? This solution seems to only be a crutch to help with backwards compatibility between versions 6-8. I can't see how the approach will help with versions 9+.

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Interesting but probably a bit too optimistic

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:57:12 GMT

I must admit that I have different feelings on this suggested approach. On one hand I can see the use of a way to preserve the site in a manner as it has been designed and implemented even some years furter in the future (think about campaign sites that are not developed further when they are done). On the other hand I do agree with others that it most likely is un-doable to ship new browser versions with a couple of legacy versions to support old sites. There are various reasons why this is not easy to do for browser vendors, but I will just highlight the big 2: File size: Every new browser version will carry at least 2 older versions with it making the distributable much bigger. This will make the threshold for low bandwidth regions like Asia and Afrika to adapt new browsers even higher then it already is (which is the reasons why IE6 is still a very big player worldwide). Browser start-up time: When each request to a site tells the browser to run in a differnet version it probably will not be uncommon to have the browser spin off multiple processed running an older version of the browser making the rendering time to view a site much higher. Also this will slow down the machine which again is the biggest problem in less evolved IT regions like Asia and Afrika. IE might solve this problem by adding all supported versions to the OS start-up process, making that slower again. And as a last comment I have to admit that we have not had many problems for the company that I work for to make sites work in IE6, IE7, FF2, Safari 2 and Opera 9. Usually we only have to add aditional logic for IE6 and that only runs when accessed by an instance of IE6. Conclusion: I like the idea, and in theorie it could have it's benefits, but in reality I do see far too many obstacles in the way for this to ever reach the production environment.

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Typical Microsoft...

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:06:23 GMT

"The solution you guys all came up with was great but we want to dominant like we did with Windows. So... Rather than fixing our browser to work like everything else we’ll invent something new so you have to go and change everything. Wooo go us!" How about they just change the damned box-model problem and we can all get on creating new stuff rather than adapting our perfectly good code to suit Microsoft’s browsers? Two words... Web and Standards

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Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:25:01 GMT

First we get doctype, now we get an extra meta. What's next. Why not adjust the doctype and put this info there?

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code to standards, not browsers

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:26:54 GMT

I want to code to standards, not browser versions. The ideal web is a web where you don't have to think about differences between browsers - because there are none. Now Microsoft is moving away from that ideal by introducing another rendering trigger, while there should be only one. A strict doctype should trigger standard-compliant rendering for all browsers. Until IE is not fully compliant (hopefully that won't take too long), I'm all for