Web (2.0)

Will Microsoft’s Feud With Web Designers Continue With IE8?

By EAN ⋅ January 23, 2008 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Back in December, I was overjoyed to read that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team had been hard at work making sure that IE8 could pass the Acid2 web standards test. Good job Microsoft. It looked like they were finally doing the right thing and developing a web browser that was not going to break the internet like their past browsers had.

Then came a post from Chris Wilson, the IE platform architect over at Microsoft. To sum it up, in said post he states that IE8 will render correctly in “standards mode” but still retain the same “quirks mode” from IE7. That’s all well and good. We get the tried and true rendering capabilities of IE7, which was certainly better than IE6, along with the supposedly better Internet Explorer 8 rendering engine. Sounds great, right?

But alas, the IE devs seem like they want to keep their feud against web developers going a bit longer. In order for a web page to render correctly following web standards, website designers and developers have to modify their meta information so that IE8 will play nice. Absolute garbage. Just make the super standards mode the default mode. Web standards are good–Microsoft needs to learn to go along with them. Such a decision to make the super standards mode the default would promote proper web coding and greatly reduce the need to test a site in multiple browsers.

On the positive side, the use of a meta tag to turn super standards mode on and off is better than forcing web designers to incorporate code in other parts of the site that could easily break something else on another browser. It’s still a tacky thing to do to web designers. The meta tag should have been used the other way around–to mark code that needs to be rendered in quirks mode IE7 style.

I suppose the real question here is how difficult is it to make a standards compliant rendering engine from the get-go. Safari and the rest of the WebKit based browsers have been able to pass the Acid2 test for years. Presto based browsers like Opera and the Internet Channel on the Nintendo Wii pass the test too. Even a “small” browser like Konqueror meets web standards. Firefox 3’s new version of the Gecko rendering engine can keep up with the standards just as well too. That’s practically every well known browser except for Internet Explorer. I would expect more effort from a company with an almost limitless budget like Microsoft. Cater to the customer–don’t make the customer cater to you.

Maybe it would be best if Microsoft just scrapped the Internet Explorer rendering engine and switched over to WebKit.