I don’t understand why the IE team has this whole “Don’t break the Web” mantra. Legacy support to this extent doesn’t seem to be followed by any other Microsoft team or sometimes even by themselves. My belief is quite simple, Let it Break!
Looking at IE7 as a product, it only runs on the current and previous editions (Home editions) of Microsoft’s own operating system. People have complained about the lack of support for old versions of Windows, but it’s a reality of development.
I think that it’s far more important that we are focusing on progress more than ensuring that archaic websites continue to function in their former glory. I’m not saying that vendors shouldn’t try to support older websites, but I think that it should be passive rather than requiring active participation from web developers.
Let’s take this time that’s being wasted on excessive legacy support and instead invest it into better bug testing and better development tools so that there are less legacy bugs to worry about.
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Lloyd Cotten
I really like the idea of version targeting except for two main issues, which have been mentioned before, but I’d like to boil it down to the crux of it:
How would browser vendors provide the support for previous versions and cross-vendor versions? Would IE9 be distributed with a complete set of APIs for IE7 & IE8 & IE9? How would FireFox render a page targeted only for IE7 and no FireFox version? If a complete set of APIs are used, then every time a new page is hit that requires another versions API, then all the libraries and symbols would have to be loaded into memory, or everything loaded on startup; that, in my mind adds up to three words: bloat, bloat, bloat!
Assuming that all my concerns above are addressed and there is a great solution for them, then next thing is would the vendors be able to promote or push the latest versions of browsers to their users in a timely manner? I run a site that attracts just the average web user (non-technical), and over 40% of my IE users are still using IE6. If I wanted to target a later version, not being able to get a majority of users up to the latest version would be a great hindrance to forward advancement!
Well I have some idea that IE8 is a lot better than IE7 in CSS standard compliance. HasLayout is now history! All browsers show deviation to the CSS standards to some degree but not due to working around some “internal data-structure” like hasLayout.
I serve up one lot of CSS, some with a few or no hacks for IE7 and quite a few for IE6. I have many test cases showing the same in every other browser apart from IE any version. These are not abstract corner-cases.
I’ve seen a few comments here and on “the other article”:http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype proposing a date-based meta tag vs. a version-based tag. At first blush, that seems like a good idea but I think it ends up breaking down somewhat quickly.
With a date, you only get to say “I’ve verified this site works for all browsers as of YYYY-MM-DD”, so you’re sort of implying that you’ve tested it on the most current IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever. Putting aside whether or not it’d be responsible to publish a site without having done so, it doesn’t give the time-strapped developer the option of testing in IE8, updating his meta tag, and leaving FF support at 2 even though version 3 was current as of that date (or, for that matter, publishing an update to take advantage of FF3, but leaving the IE version at 7 for now till browser adoption increases). A date-based meta tag seems like an all or nothing type of deal.
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Jack Smith
I think it’d be naive to think that other browsers would not be affected if this is incorporated. It’s the opposite of promoting standards rather it is encouraging laziness. Which approach is easier: learn to use proper markup or just set a version? Certainly seems like a step backward to ensure what is backward stays going forward.
I am thoroughly annoyed by MSFTyet again introducing something completely new and obtrusive to the way I work to fix their problems.
I’d like to think that when I write good code according to good specifications, my websites will only display better or the same with each new browser version.
What Microsoft is actually saying with this is “well, uhm, we don’t know if the specifications we support now will be supported in the next versions as well” and thats not really encouraging…
I see a problem with enumerating versions and browsers.
If you have to enumerate browsers that it is compatible with, then what does it mean when a user uses a non-enumerated browser? What does it mean if I specify IE=10, does it work in IE9? How about IE14 when they ported it to Linux and a bunch of the old code had to be removed?
I don’t think this is practical.
In addition, are they going to leave the whole IE7 engine in place? Or will the emulate it? Probably emulate it and you can be sure it won’t emulate “right”.
Microsoft is pretty good at maintaining backwards compatibility (to the point of emulating stacks in memory so that Wins32 programs that did scary and horrible things behind the OS’s back would work in Win95). However, they have to bite the bullet. I think this is one of those times. IE6 was very very broken and not fixed for way too long.
The advantage to making their browser work as best as possible with the standards is that users who aren’t professional will start to write pages that degrade better; not because they understand or care about that, but because the standards help you do that.
The more microsoft promotes proprietary non-standards compliant features the more pain the users will feel. Well, unless they can end up being the only browser; then they’d be the de facto standard.
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David One
Eric Meyer (from comments): “I have to hope that they [Microsoft] get this right — because the alternative is to have the advancement of standards grind to a halt, bogged down by the inability to fix past mistakes for fear of breaking existing pages.”
Utter nonsense. Just because MS have painted themselves in to a corner with their Machiavellian behaviour of the past, it’s not going to stop Firefox, Opera, Safari or anyone else pushing forward with quality, standards-compliant software. If anything, this latest debacle from MS will speed up the adoption of standards!
This entire proposal of version targeting shifts the responsibility (a.k.a. ‘blame’) away from Microsoft and on to developers and users. It adds another (potentially enormous) layer of complexity purely to make MS look not so bad.
If websites are broken by a new release of IE, we do what we always do – ignore it, live with it or fix it. The same applies for the other browsers … although the degree of breakage in the other browsers is usually minimal because they have made every effort to adhere to W3C standards (Microsoft just said they would 10 years ago, but ‘forgot’ to deliver on the promise).
Did WaSP have an office party recently and did someone slip a little something in to the punch bowl? Just wondering….
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Kevin Guterl
I know many of us say we hate using CSS hacks but I found them to be quite useful. I wish each new browser would incorporate an OFFICIAL hack that is unique for that browser. I also which we could incorporate official hacks within DOM scripts as well.
Official hacks would have two benefits: 1) We would be able to create new websites that take advantage of new browser features AND still work properly (without the new features) in older browsers; and 2) It would provide a fail-safe to accommodate any found bugs that will undoubtedly be discovered within any new browser.
The version-targeting scheme described in the article does allows us to build sites that take advantage of new browser features and support older browsers. It also does not provide any work-arounds when we discover any new bugs within a new browser.
One other benefit of having official hacks is that they would no longer need to be called “hacks”.
We’re talking about code-forking, aren’t we? Raise your hand if you’re a big fan of this practice.
I assume most pragmatic developers familiar with the practice are not big fans. Are we really going to ask the developers of IE(x+15) to back-build 15 or more rendering engines into their product, then maintain them all? FF and Op and Webkit too? Is this practical?
Like Eric, I’m naive enough to think that browser developers will eventually get it right—and even more naive that spec writers won’t make irksome changes—I code to spec, and hack as minimally as necessary to function in the Real World. Many of you do too. If our hacks are elegant, they simply dissolve, and our sites, well, get progressively enhanced.
The DOCTYPE is a way of telling the world you’re building to a spec, not a browser. Some people, in telling this, lie.
Microsoft: When they lie, it’s not your fault. I’ll let everyone else tell you what is your fault, but suffice to say, your DOCTYPE switching doesn’t break the web… it’s broken by those of us who’ve duct-taped our code with esoteric browser dependencies and hacks. Maybe you inspired our bad behavior, but you didn’t make us lie. We can read specs. We can, and have, found ingenious ways to deal with bad browser behavior while respecting the specs our DOCTYPEs are selling.
Hacks (code-based and carbon-based) are revealed when you change code. I’m okay with that. Code-fork for different DOCTYPEs when the time comes, sure, but not for your own rendering and behavioral engines. We’ll adapt. We always do.
This seems like a good way to keep folks from ever developing for the newest version of IE.
What happens if I lock my site to a version of IE that is higher than what a user has installed? Then I have a big mess, and I haven’t gained anything by being able to specify browser version. To get around this, I would have to specify “edge” and keep developing the same way I do now. But those other developers with the non-professional coding practices will just choose the lowest common denominator browser version and never update it. It will be an IE 6 web forever.
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David Cocuzzi
that I would disagree with Mr.Meyer.
The purpose of the doctype, as I see it, is to converge the morass of browser versions and standards implementations and make them manageable. A bit like herding cats but herding them all to a point on the horizon where standards compliance for web pages and browsers is the norm. Having a quirks mode and a standards mode, duplicitous as it is, seems far saner than continually diverging.
At some point, maybe 20 years into the future, when FF400 and IE9 hit the streets, browsers and OS’s will be forced to maintain absurd levels of backwards compatibility trying to accommodate every unclosed element ever written. Why should millions of poorly written web pages hold an entire industry hostage? I don’t expect my car to run forever without repairs, why should I expect a web page to?
Use case: I author a page today for IE7 and FF2.x. I specify these as my targeted browsers in the meta element. Five years from now, IE8 has properly implemented a few more CSS rules, and FF300 has again broken new ground. I want to use the new CSS rules and features. Do I re-author the page and update my meta element? How is this any better than where we are today?
Use Case: I have thousands of pages authored to IE7. IE9 just came out. Now I have to trust that MS won’t drop support for IE7. How long can we reasonably expect browser manufacturers to continue to roll up support for every past browser version into their new releases? And what does this mean for browser performance?
Right now I am having trouble seeing how authoring pages to a specific browser version is a step in the right direction.
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Philipp Wagner
A web developer should not optimize his works for a specific version of a web browser, but make it compliant to a standard—after all, that’s what they are made for.
If the development team of the IE3 realized shortly after the release that there was a bug with the their width/height calculation, why didn’t they fix it as soon as they could? At that time, nobody was writing web sites adapted to IE3 yet. There is just no need to stay backwards-compatible with bugs. If a browser vendor knows about a bug, why can’t he simply write a knowledge base entry “folks, there is a bug, it will be solved soon, until then, just wait or use some workaround”? With that approach, everybody realizes that he will have to remove his workaround and replace it with the real code as soon as the bug is fixed. This, of course, would require faster bug fixes inside the rendering engine, waiting for the next major release is not the way to go. But is that really that hard?
I would support a meta tag giving information about which HTML version this page was coded for, and every browser vendor fixes all bugs until he arrives at the point where he completely implements the standard. If you rely on non-standard behavior of a browser, the trouble will not end soon.
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Pete Hau
Rendering-engine targeting already exists: it’s called DOCTYPE! That method alone lets us tell the browser how a page is supposed to render. Why should we replace standards with multiple, branded “standards”?
The place where I can see “version targeting” being useful is in hacks, much like a standardized form of what conditional comments do today. That way developers can write code the way it’s “supposed” to be as per the standards, and add extra code to fix the rendering in whatever browser(s) they choose to fix.
However, software being the way it is, browser bugs are always going to happen, and content developers will always have to work around the limitations of the browsers of their times. The problem then, is which browser should developers work on? The theoretical, bug-free, standards-compliant browser in their heads? Or the real, bug-ridden but computer-powered browsers in their PCs?
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David Leader
How utterly depressing! And Eric Meyer is the one who used to prevent his pages being viewed by non-standards compliant browsers (e.g. my old IE5.1 Mac). Shame!
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Sander Aarts
To me this sounds like “vlek op vlek” (phrase from an old Dutch detergent commercial meaning “stain upon stain”). MS again invents a new hack to work around their previous ones. And for the looks of it this won’t be their last.
There are several problems with this approach, most of them already mentioned here:
Progression will be stopped/slowed down as developers can not define IE8 as the engine to be used when a considerable amount of users still uses IE7 or even IE6. And since ‘traditional’ progressive enhancement won’t work anymore, website will not likely be making advantage of features in later browser versions. This will hurt other browsers (non-IE) as well, especially since IE has such a large market share. Unless perhaps…
The ‘new’ progressive enhancement would be something like building enhanced versions of the site for enhanced target browsers.
Sounds kind of old school to me and it sure is not what progressive enhancement is really all about.
Browsers will be stuck to all their previous render engines. This will probably make them big (and slow), especially when new engines will introduce new APIs.
This will prevent browsers that use this hack from ever being ported to a previously unsupported OS, unless the old engines will be ported to that OS as well or the old version support will rely on emulation, which will never be sufficient, as it’s mostly bugs and quirks that make it so specific.
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Michael Landis
I can see the points of both sides of the argument, but it seems to me that if we want to maintain the idea of progressive enhancement, we should be able to either not include the meta tag at all, or include the meta tag with “IE=edge” (and perhaps “OtherUA=edge/10000”?). I guess it depends on whether browser makers will assume that the absence of the header means that it should stick to a particular version, or it should fall back to the DOCTYPE switch (which isn’t much different from what we are describing here).
I really don’t see how this is going to change the workload of diligent web developers. As new browser versions are created, we’re going to want to regression-test our sites anyways, whether to ensure that updated spec compliance isn’t buggy, or to ensure that outdated “features” are still supported as before.
What this lock would permit, however, is a longer transition period for web developers to deal with bugs in these browsers. If the current version of IE is 8 and I am relying on its implementation of a certain feature, I could add <meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” c> in all 40 of the sites I support. I can start working on bug fixes with the final release candidate of version 9, but if I can’t fix everything before IE 9 comes out, I can hope that Microsoft didn’t break the browser fork for their most recent public version. Once I fix the bugs, I can update the version number. The development timeline is now more under my control than Microsoft’s.
Either way, however, web developers who aren’t keeping track of browser developers are likely to be left in the lurch with or without this tag.
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Sander Aarts
@Michael Landis:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way it is proposed now you can not really update the version number as soon as that browser comes out. All users that have not yet updated their browser will not have the specified render engine.
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Michael Landis
I believe you’re right. It seems to me that if a user hasn’t upgraded their browser, but the browser baseline has increased (such as an IE 8 user who hasn’t upgraded to IE 9), then they will be using IE 8 while the meta tag may eventually read “IE=9”.
We deal with multiple browser versions today anyways, with graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. I don’t think we will ever really get away from not supporting older browsers. This just gives us a way to gain more time to test new browsers.
I agree with Landis, that this may give us all more time to test newer browsers. It’ll be up to us when the switch occurs.
I remember when IE7’s pre-release was available and we were all testing our Web sites with it. Some were trying to figure out how to uninstall it afterwards to return to IE6! All that’s history now.
We weren’t sure whether the final release would provide the same results, but we were preparing anyway. Anything to avoid the shame of being the first to reveal some new browser bug, live on production…
I think this form of version targeting is not a bad idea considering the alternatives, which is either no fixes to rendering bugs in IE for the foreseeable future, or using some other mechanism such as conditional comments, XML processing instructions, or overloading the MIME type somehow, all of which would have been awful hacks.
But I don’t think this should be used by the other browser vendors unless they actually need it (and it looks like they feel like they don’t, so far). And I really hope version targeting (or the lack thereof) only affects fixes to bugs in IE that are actually problematic with respect to backwards compatibility, and not improvements and other kinds of bug fixes. Which is to say, I hope this isn’t going to replace virtualization for cross-browser testing—you won’t be running IE6 just by version targeting IE6 (consider things like security changes or text rendering improvements).
If that is the case, you won’t actually need version targeting for every page or site, but only for those that actually trigger some rendering bug in IE7 (okay, those are still quite a few, unfortunately). And hopefully, IE8 will be on the level of the other browsers with respect to standards support (die, hasLayout, die), and then there’ll not be much need for version targeting beyond adding the “IE=8”? boilerplate.
More in a “post on my own blog”:http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2008/01/rendering-mode-switching-reloaded “¦
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Robert de Mildt
I have troubles following your views on how the proposed version targeting is going to stimulate browser vendors to fix bug sooner.
You give the example of a bug in IE8 being fixed in IE9 without fear of breaking up a site from the IE8 era. But if version targeting was used rendering will be correct so there’s no incentive whatsoever to fix anything. Both clients and designers not bothered with standards will see no further use for change: it works fine, so why bother fixing anything and why even bother with those nasty standards.
In turn I’m afraid Microsoft will like that attitude too. It gives them the opportunity to go back to the old days were IE6 barely had any competition and little or no improvements had to be made, and little recources had to be put into the further developement of it.
If they can make sure everybody uses version targetting in future where’s the need for fixing bugs in future versions?
We all seems to forget IE7 and soon IE8 came to be due to market share, not due to concern about advancing their browser or bugfixing. If it wasn’t for the rise of FF we still would be stuck with IE6 today.
So I’m having nightmares about just the opposite happening: advances will be slowed down.
please tell me I’m wrong so I’ll be able to sleep a bit better… ;-)
Peter-Paul Koch wrote: “The switch only targets IE. All other browsers are unaffected.“
I was under the impression that Microsoft want all other browser makers to adopt this policy too. So you’d have an Opera, Firefox or Safari with rendering engines from the past included to deal with old pages.
Douglas Tondro wrote: “Nothing angers me more than Conditional Comments when I see page code. If you can’t build it right, why bother?“
I built a site 100% to standards (XHTML Strict etc). It displayed perfectly in IE7, Opera, Firefox and Safari. But when I tested it in IE6, the layout was broken. So I had to use Conditional Comments to tweak it for IE6. I believe they are an excellent method of applying code to different versions of IE.
I had some thoughts and “posted them on my blog”:http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/2008/01/23/version-targeting-for-ie8-developer-wars-my-thoughts/
Your “cascading Style Sheet Programmer’s reference” book has served me as a my bible for many years. I have (had?) a lot of respect for you. You’re one of the last person I would have expected to buy into this Microsoft BS.
Sorry, but I have to call it what it is…
What’s got into WaSP and ALA? This discussion has nothing to do with Standards and everything to do with Microsoft market share… It’s legitimate of them, on a business level, to worry about it and make sure old sites can work with IE8.
But how can you guys agree that Standards compliance should NOT be the… huh… STANDARD. Now, thanks to Microsoft, Standards compliance becomes “edge” development? And according to gustafson article, it’s “strongly discouraged”… WHat?!
Did Microsoft send booze and exotic dancers at the meetings, and made you sign this article while you were under the influence?
I’m not real sure about this quite yet. What’s going to happen to the old sites we have? Will it default to “edge”?? That could be pretty bad.
I’m unclear on why Microsoft feels like they need to re-invent to wheel when they release a browser (using Trident and now a new rendering engine). Why don’t they just use Gecko or Webkit to really create some consistency across browsers. Maybe they have a financial obligation to fight open source with every fiber of their being”¦ I don’t know. Seems a bit ridiculous to me — but the almighty dollar tends to rule.
What are the differences between IE7 and IE8 that make this switch necessary?
I don’t know about the web as a whole, but the business customers (enterprise) all deal with either use Firefox (minority) or IE6 (majority). IE7 is only a teeny tiny part of the mix. For the most part I don’t do any hacks for IE7; I let it render like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
If the changes between IE7 and IE8 aren’t that big, then why bother with this? Microsoft already made the huge jump from IE6 to IE7.
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David Leader
I wrote:
And Eric Meyer is the one who used to prevent his pages being viewed by non-standards compliant browsers (e.g. my old IE5.1 Mac).
And he replied
I think you must have me confused with someone else.
Not if you are the guy who wrote the O’Reilly book on CSS. Your website has changed, but didn’t it used to have bleeding edge css demos which used css hacks to detect browsers that couldn’t render them, such as Mac IE5.1 and set display to none?
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m incline to give Eric Meyer the benefit of the doubt on many web topics. I’m skeptical on the whole thing, but I’d like some more information before I pass judgment.
Besides that, if IE8 is anything like IE7 this will be irrelevant since we’ll all be testing in IE6, IE7 and IE8 until “Back to the Future II” is set in present day (2012).
@David Leader: Bleeding edge CSS demos are the sort that are likely to break or fall apart horribly in older browsers such as IE Mac 5. Browser sniffing was probably introduced to stop a flood of emails to say that certain demos don’t work in certain browsers.
@Tim Wright: the default is to set such that all websites without a DOCTYPE will get quirks mode, if you have a DOCTYPE you will get IE7 standards mode and if you have the DOCTYPE and the meta tag you get to choose your target.
I have had some more thoughts on this though, since finding out that the HTML5 DOCTYPEwon’t cause a default to IE7, rather keep development on the edge. “This discovery made me much happier with the whole situation”:http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/2008/01/24/version-targeting-html5-and-the-other-browsers/ . Now I believe that the whole thing is just a necessary evil for Microsoft and it needn’t effect us developers.
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Craig Ching
All software has defects. To think that because you use this meta tag today that you are safe “now and forever” just gives you a false sense of security, nothing else. There is no guarantee that when IE9 comes out that it won’t break the IE8 rendering in a fundamental way. If you believe that’s the case, I have a bridge to sell you …
Given that software defects just are, why should we have to work around software defects in IE8’s rendering, then again in IE9’s IE8 rendering engine, ad infinitum. A defect is a defect, they should be just fixed as Firefox has done and is continuing to do in Firefox 3. For heaven’s sake, we haven’t needed this for Firefox/Opera/Safari, why, WHY, do we need this now?
You go ahead and use this tag, but when your site/application doesn’t work in IE12 because you decided you didn’t need to make your site/application compliant with the spec because being compliant with IE8 was good enough and IE12 broke it anyway, I’ll be happy that my sites/applications didn’t need this tag because I stuck to the standards.
This is madness, pure and simple. Even if browser makers could implement it, what we would end up with in reality is a proliferation of targets, not a reduction:
IE10 emulating IE7, IE10 emulating IE8, IE10 emulating IE9, and IE10 IE9 emulating IE7, IE9 emulating IE8, IE9 IE8 emulating IE7, IE8 […]
Add HTML versions and DOCTYPE switching to that equation, and you will end up with an astronomic number of combinations.
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Ray McCord
Eric checks himself and rationalizes this proposal with the dangerous assumption that the push forward in standards development would continue even after we have this oh-so-easy-to-abuse ability to freeze pages in time by doing absolutely nothing to trigger it.
Sorry, Eric. Better have a doctor check you out. When you begin to ignore your instincts, it’s a sign that the bone in your head that tells you “it’s stupid to step in front of an oncoming train” is obviously broken.
Look, we have these gut feelings for a reason. We feel relieved and satisfied when we are sure that the situation which is tingling our “spidey-sense” has been thoroughly analyzed and we are confident of our conclusions.
If you’re still getting an icky feeling inside, it’s because you’re not really fully convinced in what you’re telling yourself. That should be your cue to delve deeper.
So, you’re thinking, what is the worst that could happen if they do this?
“A Glimpse of the Near Future”:http://www.webstandards.org/2008/01/22/microsofts-version-targeting-proposal/#comment-59762
THIS IS AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERMINEOURSTANDARDSANDSILENCEOURDISSENTONCEANDFORALL. DO NOTLETTHISPROPOSAL GO UNCHALLENGED. DO NOTACCEPTTHISBLEAKFUTUREFOROURWEB.
Our feedback was not solicited. The community was not consulted. We were not involved. This was done covertly with the participation of self-proclaimed gurus and individualsNOTREPRESENTING the web development community at large NOR the official position of the Web Standards Project (WaSP). WaSP has made public this FACT:
“WaSP Statement and Discussion”:http://www.webstandards.org/2008/01/22/microsofts-version-targeting-proposal/
“Disclaim of Responsibility by Andy Clarke – Co-lead of WaSP”:http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/01/ie-lock-in#comment-6376
DO YOURPART TO PROTECTTHEOPENWEB. BOYCOTTTHISATTACK ON CHOICE, INTEROPERABILITY, ANDSTANDARDS.
Thank you for your generous devotion of your valuable time.
My first thought when I read these two articles on ALA was they’ve been bought by Microsoft??!
Seriously. Pages are coded to standards, the browsers display the standards as correctly as they can [be bothered to]. This way the standard, the one specified in the doctype, is the common point about which the markup and renderer combine.
There seems to be a bit too much talk of people thinking that the IE6 rendering engine was perfect (!, who on earth??) and about catering for the poor sops that can’t run a standards compliance check.
This may make it easier for MS (until as others say in a couple versions time they go off some other half-assed direction) but I can’t see who else.
What particular worries me about these two articles is their common assent – surely the authors would like to change someting about the method of implementation.
Why can’t MS apps just look at the doctype and choose the renderer they think might manage, Webkit maybe!
This used solution is just as bad if not worse than “made for IE4 best viewed at 640px”.
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Rick Buitenman
Please Google these three little words. Intention is everyting. And Microsofts intentions have always been clear, and even though the words coming out of Redmond have changed in the past few years, the actions haven’t.
Any experienced developer can tell you version targetting is an illusion and will break soon. The people at Microsoft are not stupid (no matter how much i hate it, IE is a big and complicated application made by some of the finest developers out there), they know this. They’re not trying to solve the standards issue, they’re selling an agenda. And it’s the same agenda Microsoft has always been selling: the market sets the standard and we control the market.
Yet again, they are manipulating the market to slowly bent to their ‘standards’, and yet again, many people are falling for it. After all, it’s just one little tag, and it solves so many problems. Conveniently forgetting that those problems have been deliberately created by the very same people that offer this ‘solution’.
A compromise would have been to have a temporary hack that does the same thing, with the total, complete and irrevocable commitment this kludge would be removed from the next version of IE. That would give the ‘IE only’ part of the web more then enough time to prevent future breakage.
Instead we now have a MS and a cabal of prominent web standards opion makers selling us the utter fairytale of version targetting and encouraging the entire web to adopt an MS-only ‘standard’, in what seems to be a very well coordinated effort.
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Richard Reumerman
I read about a lot of people worrying about IE12 or so. IE7 came 6 years after IE6. How long before 9, 10 and 12?
Besides, I miss the point of some commenters (not all though). If lazy developers would use this to render all pages like IE7 forever, what’s the difference with them using tables and maybe even font-tags like those same developers do now?
Maybe MS will drop the IE7 rendering by the time they reach IE10. Well, which one of you ever built a site he or she thought would be online for the coming 20+ years? Which company is still using the same website it was using in ‘96? Isn’t it a little naive to think browsers will support more than 3 or 4 versions backward?
By the time MS reaches IE10, IE7 will probably render in Quirks mode or something like that. If you don’t like the new tag, don’t use it. MS will probably insert it anyway. If you do use it, you can be almost certain your site looks the same for the coming 5 years or so, which is already a huge relief for me.
Maybe this is not the solution, but maybe it’s worth considering. No one knows how it will turn out exactly..
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Sander Aarts
@Richard Reumerman:
“Maybe MS will drop the IE7 rendering by the time they reach IE10. […] Isn’t it a little naive to think browsers will support more than 3 or 4 versions backward?”
After this switch is implemented in the propose way, the web will break as soon as MS drops the IE7 rendering. Why? Because all the broken pages will still be broken. That’s exactly why a ‘switch’ should be inserted in broken pages to fix them instead of standards compliant pages.
You don’t fix anything by altering all the parts that are not broken, but by altering the broken parts.
The proposed implementation with the default IE7 rendering shows that the argument of ‘not breaking the web’ is not the actual reason, because everyone will understand that MS will not support this IE7 rendering forever.
This is just a short term solution. Not a good one.
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Dustin Boyd
I’m not sure I agree with this… I don’t exactly like it, especially since someone would need to update the string specifically for each new browser release just to test. Not only that, but considering the fact that IE8 passed the Acid2 Test at one point and no other build of IE before that had passed, I would wager that multiple rendering engines might need building.
Along with that, I’m thinking about 5 years from now where CSS3 is (hopefully) complete and the latest support for CSS 2.1 as implemented in something like Firefox 2.x is not quite correct anymore. If that is the case, it makes any future browser releases that support such a ridiculous “feature” bloated and wastes a developer’s time trying to make it all compatible while still supporting new things.
In addition, consider the quirks mode vs standards mode box models. Add this version targeting mechanism into the mix, and you’ve got a gigantic codebase, not to mention the fact that this whole idea just makes things more difficult for aspiring developers who want to create a browser.
That’s my thought on this whole thing. I thought the same thing Meyer did when I finished Gustafson’s article – this helps our current situation, but what about the future? Forward compatibility is ensured, but that means that we can stay with those browser versions until something like XHTML 2.0 comes along, and we update to that causing our sites to completely break. If we wanted that to happen then we would have ignored the W3C’s effort to standardize the Web.
Sometimes I wonder how people come up with such crazy things, expecting everybody to say, “That’s a wonderful idea,” without thinking ahead first. I’m not sure about anybody else, but I was always taught to look before I leap.
I’ll admit that I don’t have any answers. But I do have a few comments. Until last month, only one of my computer clients had a screen size larger than 1024×768. Now three of them do. Most of my clients over the age of 60 (retired and spending money) set their screen resolution to 800×600 to get that large type, easy to read, effect. I have the current version of Firefox (2.0.0.11) on five different computers and web pages look different on all of them even though the screens are all 1024×768. Ubuntu wants to be completely Open Source so of course it doesn’t have Microsoft fonts installed which is the first area that is noticeably different. Firefox may be the most standards compliant browser but I seem to be able to get it to break without any trouble. I installed a font it didn’t like and it broke the spacing on some HTML entities until I removed the ‘offending’ font.
Opera has it’s own problems.
Yes, I design some basic web pages. The first thing I tell my clients is that their pages will look different on every computer and in every browser. Sometimes I have to show them on my computers before they will believe it. They almost never look at anyone else’s computer or use a second browser. I have every browser I can get on Windows, Linux, and Mac. They send me pages in Microsoft word using fonts I’ve never heard of and want me to duplicate it/them on their new web site. They tell me “It works on my computer.” and I’m sure it does. Course, sometimes they want me to do pages that resemble random video noise and wonder why they can’t read the text in the middle of it. Maybe the idea for ‘captchas’ came from one of those pages.
I have concluded that you never get ‘clean’ solutions to real problems. The best you can hope for is the ‘least dirty’. While I’m glad that people are looking out for the future of the web, I kinda feel like you’re in an ivory tower and I’m on the ground. I hope that the future you come up with doesn’t disenfranchise the people that I know.
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Richard Reumerman
I reread a part of the article by Gustafson and came to this conclusion.
This solution is not offered to us programmers who follow standards, it is offered to those who do not follow the standards, or at least not strictly.
Because of this it is obvious a lot of readers here don’t like it, because it is of no use to them and just helps those who are seen as lazy programmers. By the purists anyway.
Please note, this is no offence to either kind of programmer but just an observation. I think anyone who doesn’t like this tag shouldn’t use it, it is offered to help someone else than you.
Try to think of yourself as a major producer of a web browser like MS. You have to make things work one way or the other, so why not use the standards? They are designed for it.
However you do have a lot of users who are kind of ‘depending’ on earlier mistakes you made for their websites to work. Since you are a company you want to keep making money out of them, so you offer them a solution like this.
Certain people don’t need the solution, they don’t like it so they criticize it and won’t use it. You ignore them because this thing wasn’t meant for them anyway.
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chris skene
Say this is a backward step, or you want to use “edge”, or whatever… what happens if you just ignore it completely, or use it to lock only compatible browsers while you bug-fix for the latest version? If we ignore the tag is IE going to choke on us?
I’m in favor of a meta-tag like
meta name=“build_date” content=“28-1-2008”
If documents don’t have this it defaults to the date this rule gets introduced (kind of like PHP time() to 1970).
So we can build to (present-day) specs, put the date in the meta-tags and not worry about the site breaking when a new browser releases.
@Sander Aarts
“Browsers will be stuck to all their previous render engines. This will probably make them big (and slow), especially when new engines will introduce new APIs.”
Browser-vendors can make up their own mind if they want to offer rendering for 3 previous versions or 20. But if they do 2 at least most websites won’t break, which was what this whole discussion started about.
If IE8 would render IE7 and IE6 like they were intended it would save a lot of time.
bad idea. When ie8 does something different, you would have to fix it. You might no longer have ftp-access to that domain or the time to fix all that.
@David Cocuzzi
“Use case: I author a page today for IE7 and FF2.x. I specify these as my targeted browsers in the meta element. Five years from now, IE8 has properly implemented a few more CSS rules, and FF300 has again broken new ground. I want to use the new CSS rules and features. Do I re-author the page and update my meta element? How is this any better than where we are today?”
The difference: CHOICE!
Developers have the choice to update their sites to latest browsers and css, or let the oldies render as they were intended, thus extending their lives a few years untill most users have later browsers installed.
And if you realy want or need to update, your deadline for updating old sites becomes more flexible.
@Sander Aarts
“You don’t fix anything by altering all the parts that are not broken, but by altering the broken parts.”
But the old sites were not broken, they were made broken by non-backward-compatible new browser versions.
“altering”? No need to alter, just optional to use in sites to be build in the future.
@Ben Sekulowicz
“simply include a metadata tag indicating the last “˜build’ date of the website”
totally agree with this.
meta name=“build_date” content=“28-1-2008”
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Sander Aarts
@Carsten E:
“Browser-vendors can make up their own mind if they want to offer rendering for 3 previous versions or 20. But if they do 2 at least most websites won’t break, which was what this whole discussion started about.”
Using this switch you can specify a version number which means that if IE12 encounters a version switch that defines IE10, it has to render as IE10, otherwise there would be no reason to specify a version.
“No need to alter, just optional to use in sites to be build in the future.”
It won’t be optional in the end because once it is implemented IE7 will be the default mode forever! Not really an option in the long run. That’s just the whole problem with this switch: the fact that not the latest version will be the default rendering mode, but that of an old version. This can not be reset later on, other that introducing yet another switch.
Therefore this switch is not a solution to a problem, but only a temporarily cover up.
“In an ideal world, of course, all specifications would be perfect from the get-go, and their implementation in user agents would be immediate and flawless. In a slightly more down-to-earth version of an ideal world, browser vendors would immediately integrate regularly updated standards into new user agents—and users would have instant access to the latest version of those browsers without having to lift a finger.”
When I read that I thought “Doesn’t my antivirus software do this every day?” Each day at 2 AM it downloads an updated database of virus information and automatically installs it. Maybe the thing to do for Microsoft (and others) is to create a “standards database” that can be updated every so often automatically by the application.
In fact this could easily function as an improvement of or extension to the Firefox/IE/Opera update mechanism that alerts me that a new version is available. Just tell me that an updated “DTD entry” is available and tell me to install it. Or even better, have the browser automatically pull it down and install it.
(yes, this is pretty much a copy of another comment. The more times I say it the better chance someone will see it.)
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Mike Lowry
I’ll second Keri in post 31. Let the sites break and the users upgrade their browsers.
I remember that I was expected to upgrade to Netscape 4 when a lot of sites started using frames. We’ve all learned that frames are obnoxious and not a good idea in general, but the point was in order to use the new feature I had to upgrade. I think the same thing applies now just as much as it did when all of the browsers started supporting frames. If you want to take advantage of new browser features I say you must upgrade. I think standardized rendering is a feature worth upgrading for.
Of course upgrading will only work if the “new” browsers actually adhere to a common and standard specification.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft for making my job as a web developer as difficult as possible, with the likelihood of becoming impossible in the near future.
I can’t imagine that nested engines would lead to anything close to a stable product. Even assuming that somehow developers get the standard browser implementation of IEn running as IE7 to work as expected, there are still the other myriad uses of the IE engine to worry endlessly about.
Given that this type of support would almost certainly need additional overhead, how would a move like this affect the development of the browser for mobile devices, embedded systems and integrated browsers (like Help sections)? It is surely hard enough to get a browser to function under these conditions, let alone once you add increasing levels of complexity and a fixed hardware platform.
How would you suggest even approaching things like embedded systems where you know conclusively that an browser will not change versions? ‘lite’ installs with single version support?
Browser switching is probably MS’s response to losing market share to better web-standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla/Firefox.
The hooks:
1 For developers: Throw a spanner into the pot so developers need to spend even more time coding to IE’s peculiarities. They might be kept so busy they won’t have time to develop for other browsers.
2 For the public: Why ever use anything other than IE? It becomes the only browser capable of reaching backward and forward in time.
Blah. More posturing. More MS complications. More reason for web standards development to keep moving forward.
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Glen M
The most telling aspect of this article is that it reads more like an apology than an endorsement. It’s almost as if Eric Meyer threw up his hands in exasperation and said, “Sorry guys, I know there are a lot of problems with the idea, but this is the best we can do given the circumstances.”
As much as I respect Mr. Meyer, I’m going to have to disagree. We can and should expect better.
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Matt Turner
It’d be much more useful if Microsoft and other browsers made better resources available to web developers.. how about the latest versions of the code, e.g. http://nightly.webkit.org/
How about releasing development versions of OLD browsers that would enable developers to run multiple versions of FF, IE, whatever on the same machine for testing purposes.
How about some simplified matrices of what features have been updated, how rendering has change from browser to browser, lists of developer friendly info on fixing rendering issues etc.
Maybe if Microsoft released a developer toolbar that didn’t suck, maybe even a javascript debugger (or at least a good logger) that doesn’t require visual studio.
That’s the kind of stuff that as a developer, i would find genuinely helpful. There is plenty of room for improvement in other areas without going down this road.
The browser wars may be back if this proposal goes ahead. If so, do battle with words. Let Microsoft know we are NOT happy with this idea, which may well stagnate large parts of the web, locked into IE-only sites designed for out-of-date browser versions.
I’ve made a range of “t-shirt designs”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherhester/sets/72157603847933333/ suitable for the oncoming battle. Let’s all join forces and combat this growing threat. Don’t let Microsoft control the web and hold back standards!
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Kirk Brown
There are a number of good points made in the responses to this post. I have a few thoughts of my own:
My own recommendation would be to use HTML 5 as a breakthrough point. At this point in time, force the doctype to be strictly HTML 5. Everything made before this time would be HTML 4 or earlier and would have quirks. Have no “quirks” mode for HTML 5. If the markup is wrong, let the browser show a failure.
I’d also recommend the doctype for HTML 5 include the numeral “5”. Should a future standard break HTML 5 rules, browsers would know to use HTML 5. If you write a faulty program, it’s going to crash. If you don’t write web page correctly, it shouldn’t display.
I see no reason to use the meta tag to target specific browsers. Many users upgrade to the latest browsers. Some are slower to adopt than others.
With the meta tag solution, would subversions be compatible under the major number or separately numbered? IE5 / IE5.01 / IE5.5 anyone?
What I truly think would make a better solution is to have pages tagged with standard numbers. For example:
<standards>
<standard name=“HTML” versi >
<standard name=“CSS” versi >
<standard name=“ECMAScript” versi >
</standards>
That way, the browser would know exactly what versions of each technology were coded into a page. This would also encourage page writers to think about the standards being used. Authoring tools would also become more compliant.
89 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleKeri Henare
I don’t understand why the IE team has this whole “Don’t break the Web” mantra. Legacy support to this extent doesn’t seem to be followed by any other Microsoft team or sometimes even by themselves. My belief is quite simple, Let it Break!
Looking at IE7 as a product, it only runs on the current and previous editions (Home editions) of Microsoft’s own operating system. People have complained about the lack of support for old versions of Windows, but it’s a reality of development.
I think that it’s far more important that we are focusing on progress more than ensuring that archaic websites continue to function in their former glory. I’m not saying that vendors shouldn’t try to support older websites, but I think that it should be passive rather than requiring active participation from web developers.
Let’s take this time that’s being wasted on excessive legacy support and instead invest it into better bug testing and better development tools so that there are less legacy bugs to worry about.
Lloyd Cotten
I really like the idea of version targeting except for two main issues, which have been mentioned before, but I’d like to boil it down to the crux of it:
Just my 2¢.
Alan Gresley
@David Smith
Well I have some idea that IE8 is a lot better than IE7 in CSS standard compliance. HasLayout is now history! All browsers show deviation to the CSS standards to some degree but not due to working around some “internal data-structure” like hasLayout.
I serve up one lot of CSS, some with a few or no hacks for IE7 and quite a few for IE6. I have many test cases showing the same in every other browser apart from IE any version. These are not abstract corner-cases.
joel boonstra
I’ve seen a few comments here and on “the other article”:http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype proposing a date-based meta tag vs. a version-based tag. At first blush, that seems like a good idea but I think it ends up breaking down somewhat quickly.
With a date, you only get to say “I’ve verified this site works for all browsers as of YYYY-MM-DD”, so you’re sort of implying that you’ve tested it on the most current IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, whatever. Putting aside whether or not it’d be responsible to publish a site without having done so, it doesn’t give the time-strapped developer the option of testing in IE8, updating his meta tag, and leaving FF support at 2 even though version 3 was current as of that date (or, for that matter, publishing an update to take advantage of FF3, but leaving the IE version at 7 for now till browser adoption increases). A date-based meta tag seems like an all or nothing type of deal.
Jack Smith
I think it’d be naive to think that other browsers would not be affected if this is incorporated. It’s the opposite of promoting standards rather it is encouraging laziness. Which approach is easier: learn to use proper markup or just set a version? Certainly seems like a step backward to ensure what is backward stays going forward.
Kilian Valkhof
I am thoroughly annoyed by MSFT yet again introducing something completely new and obtrusive to the way I work to fix their problems.
I’d like to think that when I write good code according to good specifications, my websites will only display better or the same with each new browser version.
What Microsoft is actually saying with this is “well, uhm, we don’t know if the specifications we support now will be supported in the next versions as well” and thats not really encouraging…
Christian Holtje
I see a problem with enumerating versions and browsers.
If you have to enumerate browsers that it is compatible with, then what does it mean when a user uses a non-enumerated browser? What does it mean if I specify IE=10, does it work in IE9? How about IE14 when they ported it to Linux and a bunch of the old code had to be removed?
I don’t think this is practical.
In addition, are they going to leave the whole IE7 engine in place? Or will the emulate it? Probably emulate it and you can be sure it won’t emulate “right”.
Microsoft is pretty good at maintaining backwards compatibility (to the point of emulating stacks in memory so that Wins32 programs that did scary and horrible things behind the OS’s back would work in Win95). However, they have to bite the bullet. I think this is one of those times. IE6 was very very broken and not fixed for way too long.
The advantage to making their browser work as best as possible with the standards is that users who aren’t professional will start to write pages that degrade better; not because they understand or care about that, but because the standards help you do that.
The more microsoft promotes proprietary non-standards compliant features the more pain the users will feel. Well, unless they can end up being the only browser; then they’d be the de facto standard.
Ciao!
David One
Eric Meyer (from comments): “I have to hope that they [Microsoft] get this right — because the alternative is to have the advancement of standards grind to a halt, bogged down by the inability to fix past mistakes for fear of breaking existing pages.”
Utter nonsense. Just because MS have painted themselves in to a corner with their Machiavellian behaviour of the past, it’s not going to stop Firefox, Opera, Safari or anyone else pushing forward with quality, standards-compliant software. If anything, this latest debacle from MS will speed up the adoption of standards!
This entire proposal of version targeting shifts the responsibility (a.k.a. ‘blame’) away from Microsoft and on to developers and users. It adds another (potentially enormous) layer of complexity purely to make MS look not so bad.
If websites are broken by a new release of IE, we do what we always do – ignore it, live with it or fix it. The same applies for the other browsers … although the degree of breakage in the other browsers is usually minimal because they have made every effort to adhere to W3C standards (Microsoft just said they would 10 years ago, but ‘forgot’ to deliver on the promise).
Did WaSP have an office party recently and did someone slip a little something in to the punch bowl? Just wondering….
Kevin Guterl
I know many of us say we hate using CSS hacks but I found them to be quite useful. I wish each new browser would incorporate an OFFICIAL hack that is unique for that browser. I also which we could incorporate official hacks within DOM scripts as well.
Official hacks would have two benefits: 1) We would be able to create new websites that take advantage of new browser features AND still work properly (without the new features) in older browsers; and 2) It would provide a fail-safe to accommodate any found bugs that will undoubtedly be discovered within any new browser.
The version-targeting scheme described in the article does allows us to build sites that take advantage of new browser features and support older browsers. It also does not provide any work-arounds when we discover any new bugs within a new browser.
One other benefit of having official hacks is that they would no longer need to be called “hacks”.
Chris Grocki
We’re talking about code-forking, aren’t we? Raise your hand if you’re a big fan of this practice.
I assume most pragmatic developers familiar with the practice are not big fans. Are we really going to ask the developers of IE(x+15) to back-build 15 or more rendering engines into their product, then maintain them all? FF and Op and Webkit too? Is this practical?
Like Eric, I’m naive enough to think that browser developers will eventually get it right—and even more naive that spec writers won’t make irksome changes—I code to spec, and hack as minimally as necessary to function in the Real World. Many of you do too. If our hacks are elegant, they simply dissolve, and our sites, well, get progressively enhanced.
The DOCTYPE is a way of telling the world you’re building to a spec, not a browser. Some people, in telling this, lie.
Microsoft: When they lie, it’s not your fault. I’ll let everyone else tell you what is your fault, but suffice to say, your DOCTYPE switching doesn’t break the web… it’s broken by those of us who’ve duct-taped our code with esoteric browser dependencies and hacks. Maybe you inspired our bad behavior, but you didn’t make us lie. We can read specs. We can, and have, found ingenious ways to deal with bad browser behavior while respecting the specs our DOCTYPEs are selling.
Hacks (code-based and carbon-based) are revealed when you change code. I’m okay with that. Code-fork for different DOCTYPEs when the time comes, sure, but not for your own rendering and behavioral engines. We’ll adapt. We always do.
Christian Holtje
I like the CSS hacks idea a lot. It would degrade and would be nice to have….
internet-explorer v7 * img { border: blah blah; }
or
firefox * .button { -moz-specific-element: }
Seems much nicer than the meta hack.
The selector could be above the document:
<internet-explorer>
<v7>
<html>
<body>
….
Ciao!
Christian Holtje
Grr… The preview seems broken:
Ciao!
Christian Holtje
I give up. The bold is because I’m using * characters. The preview shows it the way I want it, but it’s not displaying right.
Ciao!
Andrea Arbogast
This seems like a good way to keep folks from ever developing for the newest version of IE.
What happens if I lock my site to a version of IE that is higher than what a user has installed? Then I have a big mess, and I haven’t gained anything by being able to specify browser version. To get around this, I would have to specify “edge” and keep developing the same way I do now. But those other developers with the non-professional coding practices will just choose the lowest common denominator browser version and never update it. It will be an IE 6 web forever.
David Cocuzzi
that I would disagree with Mr.Meyer.
The purpose of the doctype, as I see it, is to converge the morass of browser versions and standards implementations and make them manageable. A bit like herding cats but herding them all to a point on the horizon where standards compliance for web pages and browsers is the norm. Having a quirks mode and a standards mode, duplicitous as it is, seems far saner than continually diverging.
At some point, maybe 20 years into the future, when FF400 and IE9 hit the streets, browsers and OS’s will be forced to maintain absurd levels of backwards compatibility trying to accommodate every unclosed element ever written. Why should millions of poorly written web pages hold an entire industry hostage? I don’t expect my car to run forever without repairs, why should I expect a web page to?
Use case: I author a page today for IE7 and FF2.x. I specify these as my targeted browsers in the meta element. Five years from now, IE8 has properly implemented a few more CSS rules, and FF300 has again broken new ground. I want to use the new CSS rules and features. Do I re-author the page and update my meta element? How is this any better than where we are today?
Use Case: I have thousands of pages authored to IE7. IE9 just came out. Now I have to trust that MS won’t drop support for IE7. How long can we reasonably expect browser manufacturers to continue to roll up support for every past browser version into their new releases? And what does this mean for browser performance?
Right now I am having trouble seeing how authoring pages to a specific browser version is a step in the right direction.
Philipp Wagner
A web developer should not optimize his works for a specific version of a web browser, but make it compliant to a standard—after all, that’s what they are made for.
If the development team of the IE3 realized shortly after the release that there was a bug with the their width/height calculation, why didn’t they fix it as soon as they could? At that time, nobody was writing web sites adapted to IE3 yet. There is just no need to stay backwards-compatible with bugs. If a browser vendor knows about a bug, why can’t he simply write a knowledge base entry “folks, there is a bug, it will be solved soon, until then, just wait or use some workaround”? With that approach, everybody realizes that he will have to remove his workaround and replace it with the real code as soon as the bug is fixed. This, of course, would require faster bug fixes inside the rendering engine, waiting for the next major release is not the way to go. But is that really that hard?
I would support a meta tag giving information about which HTML version this page was coded for, and every browser vendor fixes all bugs until he arrives at the point where he completely implements the standard. If you rely on non-standard behavior of a browser, the trouble will not end soon.
Pete Hau
Rendering-engine targeting already exists: it’s called DOCTYPE! That method alone lets us tell the browser how a page is supposed to render. Why should we replace standards with multiple, branded “standards”?
The place where I can see “version targeting” being useful is in hacks, much like a standardized form of what conditional comments do today. That way developers can write code the way it’s “supposed” to be as per the standards, and add extra code to fix the rendering in whatever browser(s) they choose to fix.
However, software being the way it is, browser bugs are always going to happen, and content developers will always have to work around the limitations of the browsers of their times. The problem then, is which browser should developers work on? The theoretical, bug-free, standards-compliant browser in their heads? Or the real, bug-ridden but computer-powered browsers in their PCs?
David Leader
How utterly depressing! And Eric Meyer is the one who used to prevent his pages being viewed by non-standards compliant browsers (e.g. my old IE5.1 Mac). Shame!
Sander Aarts
To me this sounds like “vlek op vlek” (phrase from an old Dutch detergent commercial meaning “stain upon stain”). MS again invents a new hack to work around their previous ones. And for the looks of it this won’t be their last.
There are several problems with this approach, most of them already mentioned here:
Sounds kind of old school to me and it sure is not what progressive enhancement is really all about.
Michael Landis
I can see the points of both sides of the argument, but it seems to me that if we want to maintain the idea of progressive enhancement, we should be able to either not include the meta tag at all, or include the meta tag with “IE=edge” (and perhaps “OtherUA=edge/10000”?). I guess it depends on whether browser makers will assume that the absence of the header means that it should stick to a particular version, or it should fall back to the DOCTYPE switch (which isn’t much different from what we are describing here).
I really don’t see how this is going to change the workload of diligent web developers. As new browser versions are created, we’re going to want to regression-test our sites anyways, whether to ensure that updated spec compliance isn’t buggy, or to ensure that outdated “features” are still supported as before.
What this lock would permit, however, is a longer transition period for web developers to deal with bugs in these browsers. If the current version of IE is 8 and I am relying on its implementation of a certain feature, I could add <meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” c> in all 40 of the sites I support. I can start working on bug fixes with the final release candidate of version 9, but if I can’t fix everything before IE 9 comes out, I can hope that Microsoft didn’t break the browser fork for their most recent public version. Once I fix the bugs, I can update the version number. The development timeline is now more under my control than Microsoft’s.
Either way, however, web developers who aren’t keeping track of browser developers are likely to be left in the lurch with or without this tag.
Sander Aarts
@Michael Landis:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way it is proposed now you can not really update the version number as soon as that browser comes out. All users that have not yet updated their browser will not have the specified render engine.
Michael Landis
I believe you’re right. It seems to me that if a user hasn’t upgraded their browser, but the browser baseline has increased (such as an IE 8 user who hasn’t upgraded to IE 9), then they will be using IE 8 while the meta tag may eventually read “IE=9”.
We deal with multiple browser versions today anyways, with graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. I don’t think we will ever really get away from not supporting older browsers. This just gives us a way to gain more time to test new browsers.
Eric Meyer
I think you must have me confused with someone else.
Kevin Davison
I agree with Landis, that this may give us all more time to test newer browsers. It’ll be up to us when the switch occurs.
I remember when IE7’s pre-release was available and we were all testing our Web sites with it. Some were trying to figure out how to uninstall it afterwards to return to IE6! All that’s history now.
We weren’t sure whether the final release would provide the same results, but we were preparing anyway. Anything to avoid the shame of being the first to reveal some new browser bug, live on production…
Christopher Lenz
I think this form of version targeting is not a bad idea considering the alternatives, which is either no fixes to rendering bugs in IE for the foreseeable future, or using some other mechanism such as conditional comments, XML processing instructions, or overloading the MIME type somehow, all of which would have been awful hacks.
But I don’t think this should be used by the other browser vendors unless they actually need it (and it looks like they feel like they don’t, so far). And I really hope version targeting (or the lack thereof) only affects fixes to bugs in IE that are actually problematic with respect to backwards compatibility, and not improvements and other kinds of bug fixes. Which is to say, I hope this isn’t going to replace virtualization for cross-browser testing—you won’t be running IE6 just by version targeting IE6 (consider things like security changes or text rendering improvements).
If that is the case, you won’t actually need version targeting for every page or site, but only for those that actually trigger some rendering bug in IE7 (okay, those are still quite a few, unfortunately). And hopefully, IE8 will be on the level of the other browsers with respect to standards support (die,
hasLayout, die), and then there’ll not be much need for version targeting beyond adding the “IE=8”? boilerplate.More in a “post on my own blog”:http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2008/01/rendering-mode-switching-reloaded “¦
Robert de Mildt
I have troubles following your views on how the proposed version targeting is going to stimulate browser vendors to fix bug sooner.
You give the example of a bug in IE8 being fixed in IE9 without fear of breaking up a site from the IE8 era. But if version targeting was used rendering will be correct so there’s no incentive whatsoever to fix anything. Both clients and designers not bothered with standards will see no further use for change: it works fine, so why bother fixing anything and why even bother with those nasty standards.
In turn I’m afraid Microsoft will like that attitude too. It gives them the opportunity to go back to the old days were IE6 barely had any competition and little or no improvements had to be made, and little recources had to be put into the further developement of it.
If they can make sure everybody uses version targetting in future where’s the need for fixing bugs in future versions?
We all seems to forget IE7 and soon IE8 came to be due to market share, not due to concern about advancing their browser or bugfixing. If it wasn’t for the rise of FF we still would be stuck with IE6 today.
So I’m having nightmares about just the opposite happening: advances will be slowed down.
please tell me I’m wrong so I’ll be able to sleep a bit better… ;-)
Chris Hester
Peter-Paul Koch wrote: “The switch only targets IE. All other browsers are unaffected.“
I was under the impression that Microsoft want all other browser makers to adopt this policy too. So you’d have an Opera, Firefox or Safari with rendering engines from the past included to deal with old pages.
Douglas Tondro wrote: “Nothing angers me more than Conditional Comments when I see page code. If you can’t build it right, why bother?“
I built a site 100% to standards (XHTML Strict etc). It displayed perfectly in IE7, Opera, Firefox and Safari. But when I tested it in IE6, the layout was broken. So I had to use Conditional Comments to tweak it for IE6. I believe they are an excellent method of applying code to different versions of IE.
Phil Nash
I had some thoughts and “posted them on my blog”:http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/2008/01/23/version-targeting-for-ie8-developer-wars-my-thoughts/
What do you think?
Yann B
Your “cascading Style Sheet Programmer’s reference” book has served me as a my bible for many years. I have (had?) a lot of respect for you. You’re one of the last person I would have expected to buy into this Microsoft BS.
Sorry, but I have to call it what it is…
What’s got into WaSP and ALA?
This discussion has nothing to do with Standards and everything to do with Microsoft market share… It’s legitimate of them, on a business level, to worry about it and make sure old sites can work with IE8.
But how can you guys agree that Standards compliance should NOT be the… huh… STANDARD. Now, thanks to Microsoft, Standards compliance becomes “edge” development? And according to gustafson article, it’s “strongly discouraged”… WHat?!
Did Microsoft send booze and exotic dancers at the meetings, and made you sign this article while you were under the influence?
What is going on???
Tim-Wright
I’m not real sure about this quite yet. What’s going to happen to the old sites we have? Will it default to “edge”?? That could be pretty bad.
I’m unclear on why Microsoft feels like they need to re-invent to wheel when they release a browser (using Trident and now a new rendering engine). Why don’t they just use Gecko or Webkit to really create some consistency across browsers. Maybe they have a financial obligation to fight open source with every fiber of their being”¦ I don’t know. Seems a bit ridiculous to me — but the almighty dollar tends to rule.
Christian Holtje
I have a question.
What are the differences between IE7 and IE8 that make this switch necessary?
I don’t know about the web as a whole, but the business customers (enterprise) all deal with either use Firefox (minority) or IE6 (majority). IE7 is only a teeny tiny part of the mix. For the most part I don’t do any hacks for IE7; I let it render like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
If the changes between IE7 and IE8 aren’t that big, then why bother with this? Microsoft already made the huge jump from IE6 to IE7.
Ciao!
David Leader
I wrote:
And Eric Meyer is the one who used to prevent his pages being viewed by non-standards compliant browsers (e.g. my old IE5.1 Mac).
And he replied
I think you must have me confused with someone else.
Not if you are the guy who wrote the O’Reilly book on CSS. Your website has changed, but didn’t it used to have bleeding edge css demos which used css hacks to detect browsers that couldn’t render them, such as Mac IE5.1 and set display to none?
Tim-Wright
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m incline to give Eric Meyer the benefit of the doubt on many web topics. I’m skeptical on the whole thing, but I’d like some more information before I pass judgment.
Besides that, if IE8 is anything like IE7 this will be irrelevant since we’ll all be testing in IE6, IE7 and IE8 until “Back to the Future II” is set in present day (2012).
Phil Nash
@David Leader: Bleeding edge CSS demos are the sort that are likely to break or fall apart horribly in older browsers such as IE Mac 5. Browser sniffing was probably introduced to stop a flood of emails to say that certain demos don’t work in certain browsers.
@Tim Wright: the default is to set such that all websites without a DOCTYPE will get quirks mode, if you have a DOCTYPE you will get IE7 standards mode and if you have the DOCTYPE and the meta tag you get to choose your target.
I have had some more thoughts on this though, since finding out that the HTML5 DOCTYPE won’t cause a default to IE7, rather keep development on the edge. “This discovery made me much happier with the whole situation”:http://www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk/2008/01/24/version-targeting-html5-and-the-other-browsers/ . Now I believe that the whole thing is just a necessary evil for Microsoft and it needn’t effect us developers.
Sander Aarts
“The way I see it”:http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/23/version-two/?caught_as=moderation#comment-304820
Craig Ching
All software has defects. To think that because you use this meta tag today that you are safe “now and forever” just gives you a false sense of security, nothing else. There is no guarantee that when IE9 comes out that it won’t break the IE8 rendering in a fundamental way. If you believe that’s the case, I have a bridge to sell you …
Given that software defects just are, why should we have to work around software defects in IE8’s rendering, then again in IE9’s IE8 rendering engine, ad infinitum. A defect is a defect, they should be just fixed as Firefox has done and is continuing to do in Firefox 3. For heaven’s sake, we haven’t needed this for Firefox/Opera/Safari, why, WHY, do we need this now?
You go ahead and use this tag, but when your site/application doesn’t work in IE12 because you decided you didn’t need to make your site/application compliant with the spec because being compliant with IE8 was good enough and IE12 broke it anyway, I’ll be happy that my sites/applications didn’t need this tag because I stuck to the standards.
Vidar Ramdal
Add HTML versions and DOCTYPE switching to that equation, and you will end up with an astronomic number of combinations.
Ray McCord
Eric checks himself and rationalizes this proposal with the dangerous assumption that the push forward in standards development would continue even after we have this oh-so-easy-to-abuse ability to freeze pages in time by doing absolutely nothing to trigger it.
Sorry, Eric. Better have a doctor check you out. When you begin to ignore your instincts, it’s a sign that the bone in your head that tells you “it’s stupid to step in front of an oncoming train” is obviously broken.
Look, we have these gut feelings for a reason. We feel relieved and satisfied when we are sure that the situation which is tingling our “spidey-sense” has been thoroughly analyzed and we are confident of our conclusions.
If you’re still getting an icky feeling inside, it’s because you’re not really fully convinced in what you’re telling yourself. That should be your cue to delve deeper.
So, you’re thinking, what is the worst that could happen if they do this?
“A Glimpse of the Near Future”:http://www.webstandards.org/2008/01/22/microsofts-version-targeting-proposal/#comment-59762
THIS IS AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERMINE OUR STANDARDS AND SILENCE OUR DISSENT ONCE AND FOR ALL. DO NOT LET THIS PROPOSAL GO UNCHALLENGED. DO NOT ACCEPT THIS BLEAK FUTURE FOR OUR WEB.
Our feedback was not solicited. The community was not consulted. We were not involved. This was done covertly with the participation of self-proclaimed gurus and individuals NOT REPRESENTING the web development community at large NOR the official position of the Web Standards Project (WaSP). WaSP has made public this FACT:
DO YOUR PART TO PROTECT THE OPEN WEB. BOYCOTT THIS ATTACK ON CHOICE, INTEROPERABILITY, AND STANDARDS.
Thank you for your generous devotion of your valuable time.
Ray McCord
We owe it to ourselves:
“Alternatives NOW”:http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx#7228772
Give them something to do, other than coding the original proposal!
p bhj
My first thought when I read these two articles on ALA was they’ve been bought by Microsoft??!
Seriously. Pages are coded to standards, the browsers display the standards as correctly as they can [be bothered to]. This way the standard, the one specified in the doctype, is the common point about which the markup and renderer combine.
There seems to be a bit too much talk of people thinking that the IE6 rendering engine was perfect (!, who on earth??) and about catering for the poor sops that can’t run a standards compliance check.
This may make it easier for MS (until as others say in a couple versions time they go off some other half-assed direction) but I can’t see who else.
What particular worries me about these two articles is their common assent – surely the authors would like to change someting about the method of implementation.
Why can’t MS apps just look at the doctype and choose the renderer they think might manage, Webkit maybe!
This used solution is just as bad if not worse than “made for IE4 best viewed at 640px”.
Rick Buitenman
Please Google these three little words. Intention is everyting. And Microsofts intentions have always been clear, and even though the words coming out of Redmond have changed in the past few years, the actions haven’t.
Any experienced developer can tell you version targetting is an illusion and will break soon. The people at Microsoft are not stupid (no matter how much i hate it, IE is a big and complicated application made by some of the finest developers out there), they know this. They’re not trying to solve the standards issue, they’re selling an agenda. And it’s the same agenda Microsoft has always been selling: the market sets the standard and we control the market.
Yet again, they are manipulating the market to slowly bent to their ‘standards’, and yet again, many people are falling for it. After all, it’s just one little tag, and it solves so many problems. Conveniently forgetting that those problems have been deliberately created by the very same people that offer this ‘solution’.
A compromise would have been to have a temporary hack that does the same thing, with the total, complete and irrevocable commitment this kludge would be removed from the next version of IE. That would give the ‘IE only’ part of the web more then enough time to prevent future breakage.
Instead we now have a MS and a cabal of prominent web standards opion makers selling us the utter fairytale of version targetting and encouraging the entire web to adopt an MS-only ‘standard’, in what seems to be a very well coordinated effort.
Richard Reumerman
I read about a lot of people worrying about IE12 or so. IE7 came 6 years after IE6. How long before 9, 10 and 12?
Besides, I miss the point of some commenters (not all though). If lazy developers would use this to render all pages like IE7 forever, what’s the difference with them using tables and maybe even font-tags like those same developers do now?
Maybe MS will drop the IE7 rendering by the time they reach IE10. Well, which one of you ever built a site he or she thought would be online for the coming 20+ years? Which company is still using the same website it was using in ‘96? Isn’t it a little naive to think browsers will support more than 3 or 4 versions backward?
By the time MS reaches IE10, IE7 will probably render in Quirks mode or something like that. If you don’t like the new tag, don’t use it. MS will probably insert it anyway. If you do use it, you can be almost certain your site looks the same for the coming 5 years or so, which is already a huge relief for me.
Maybe this is not the solution, but maybe it’s worth considering. No one knows how it will turn out exactly..
Sander Aarts
@Richard Reumerman:
“Maybe MS will drop the IE7 rendering by the time they reach IE10. […] Isn’t it a little naive to think browsers will support more than 3 or 4 versions backward?”
After this switch is implemented in the propose way, the web will break as soon as MS drops the IE7 rendering. Why? Because all the broken pages will still be broken. That’s exactly why a ‘switch’ should be inserted in broken pages to fix them instead of standards compliant pages.
You don’t fix anything by altering all the parts that are not broken, but by altering the broken parts.
The proposed implementation with the default IE7 rendering shows that the argument of ‘not breaking the web’ is not the actual reason, because everyone will understand that MS will not support this IE7 rendering forever.
This is just a short term solution. Not a good one.
Bryan Warhold
The first thought that comes to mind after reading IE8 emulation is:
IE8 emulating IE6 = easy way for developer to make little or no effort in adopting standards.
This seems like a way for Microsoft to take one step back from adopting standards when they should be taking a step forward. unreal…
Ray McCord
We owe it to ourselves:
Alternatives NOW!
See here for a breakdown of the problem and start helping out on an alternative solution:
“IE Blog Comment”:http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx#7254512
Web developers unite!
Dustin Boyd
I’m not sure I agree with this… I don’t exactly like it, especially since someone would need to update the string specifically for each new browser release just to test. Not only that, but considering the fact that IE8 passed the Acid2 Test at one point and no other build of IE before that had passed, I would wager that multiple rendering engines might need building.
Along with that, I’m thinking about 5 years from now where CSS3 is (hopefully) complete and the latest support for CSS 2.1 as implemented in something like Firefox 2.x is not quite correct anymore. If that is the case, it makes any future browser releases that support such a ridiculous “feature” bloated and wastes a developer’s time trying to make it all compatible while still supporting new things.
In addition, consider the quirks mode vs standards mode box models. Add this version targeting mechanism into the mix, and you’ve got a gigantic codebase, not to mention the fact that this whole idea just makes things more difficult for aspiring developers who want to create a browser.
That’s my thought on this whole thing. I thought the same thing Meyer did when I finished Gustafson’s article – this helps our current situation, but what about the future? Forward compatibility is ensured, but that means that we can stay with those browser versions until something like XHTML 2.0 comes along, and we update to that causing our sites to completely break. If we wanted that to happen then we would have ignored the W3C’s effort to standardize the Web.
Sometimes I wonder how people come up with such crazy things, expecting everybody to say, “That’s a wonderful idea,” without thinking ahead first. I’m not sure about anybody else, but I was always taught to look before I leap.
Dave Baldwin
I’ll admit that I don’t have any answers. But I do have a few comments. Until last month, only one of my computer clients had a screen size larger than 1024×768. Now three of them do. Most of my clients over the age of 60 (retired and spending money) set their screen resolution to 800×600 to get that large type, easy to read, effect. I have the current version of Firefox (2.0.0.11) on five different computers and web pages look different on all of them even though the screens are all 1024×768. Ubuntu wants to be completely Open Source so of course it doesn’t have Microsoft fonts installed which is the first area that is noticeably different. Firefox may be the most standards compliant browser but I seem to be able to get it to break without any trouble. I installed a font it didn’t like and it broke the spacing on some HTML entities until I removed the ‘offending’ font.
Opera has it’s own problems.
Yes, I design some basic web pages. The first thing I tell my clients is that their pages will look different on every computer and in every browser. Sometimes I have to show them on my computers before they will believe it. They almost never look at anyone else’s computer or use a second browser. I have every browser I can get on Windows, Linux, and Mac. They send me pages in Microsoft word using fonts I’ve never heard of and want me to duplicate it/them on their new web site. They tell me “It works on my computer.” and I’m sure it does. Course, sometimes they want me to do pages that resemble random video noise and wonder why they can’t read the text in the middle of it. Maybe the idea for ‘captchas’ came from one of those pages.
I have concluded that you never get ‘clean’ solutions to real problems. The best you can hope for is the ‘least dirty’. While I’m glad that people are looking out for the future of the web, I kinda feel like you’re in an ivory tower and I’m on the ground. I hope that the future you come up with doesn’t disenfranchise the people that I know.
Richard Reumerman
I reread a part of the article by Gustafson and came to this conclusion.
This solution is not offered to us programmers who follow standards, it is offered to those who do not follow the standards, or at least not strictly.
Because of this it is obvious a lot of readers here don’t like it, because it is of no use to them and just helps those who are seen as lazy programmers. By the purists anyway.
Please note, this is no offence to either kind of programmer but just an observation. I think anyone who doesn’t like this tag shouldn’t use it, it is offered to help someone else than you.
Try to think of yourself as a major producer of a web browser like MS. You have to make things work one way or the other, so why not use the standards? They are designed for it.
However you do have a lot of users who are kind of ‘depending’ on earlier mistakes you made for their websites to work. Since you are a company you want to keep making money out of them, so you offer them a solution like this.
Certain people don’t need the solution, they don’t like it so they criticize it and won’t use it. You ignore them because this thing wasn’t meant for them anyway.
And that’s what’s going to happen I guess..
chris skene
Say this is a backward step, or you want to use “edge”, or whatever… what happens if you just ignore it completely, or use it to lock only compatible browsers while you bug-fix for the latest version? If we ignore the tag is IE going to choke on us?
Carsten E
I’m in favor of a meta-tag like
meta name=“build_date” content=“28-1-2008”
If documents don’t have this it defaults to the date this rule gets introduced (kind of like PHP time() to 1970).
So we can build to (present-day) specs, put the date in the meta-tags and not worry about the site breaking when a new browser releases.
@Sander Aarts
“Browsers will be stuck to all their previous render engines. This will probably make them big (and slow), especially when new engines will introduce new APIs.”
Browser-vendors can make up their own mind if they want to offer rendering for 3 previous versions or 20. But if they do 2 at least most websites won’t break, which was what this whole discussion started about.
If IE8 would render IE7 and IE6 like they were intended it would save a lot of time.
@Christian Holtje
“internet-explorer v7 img { border: blah blah; }”
bad idea. When ie8 does something different, you would have to fix it. You might no longer have ftp-access to that domain or the time to fix all that.
@David Cocuzzi
“Use case: I author a page today for IE7 and FF2.x. I specify these as my targeted browsers in the meta element. Five years from now, IE8 has properly implemented a few more CSS rules, and FF300 has again broken new ground. I want to use the new CSS rules and features. Do I re-author the page and update my meta element? How is this any better than where we are today?”
The difference: CHOICE!
Developers have the choice to update their sites to latest browsers and css, or let the oldies render as they were intended, thus extending their lives a few years untill most users have later browsers installed.
And if you realy want or need to update, your deadline for updating old sites becomes more flexible.
@Sander Aarts
“You don’t fix anything by altering all the parts that are not broken, but by altering the broken parts.”
But the old sites were not broken, they were made broken by non-backward-compatible new browser versions.
“altering”? No need to alter, just optional to use in sites to be build in the future.
@Ben Sekulowicz
“simply include a metadata tag indicating the last “˜build’ date of the website”
totally agree with this.
meta name=“build_date” content=“28-1-2008”
Sander Aarts
@Carsten E:
“Browser-vendors can make up their own mind if they want to offer rendering for 3 previous versions or 20. But if they do 2 at least most websites won’t break, which was what this whole discussion started about.”
Using this switch you can specify a version number which means that if IE12 encounters a version switch that defines IE10, it has to render as IE10, otherwise there would be no reason to specify a version.
“No need to alter, just optional to use in sites to be build in the future.”
It won’t be optional in the end because once it is implemented IE7 will be the default mode forever! Not really an option in the long run. That’s just the whole problem with this switch: the fact that not the latest version will be the default rendering mode, but that of an old version. This can not be reset later on, other that introducing yet another switch.
Therefore this switch is not a solution to a problem, but only a temporarily cover up.
matt bear
From the original Beyond Doctype article:
“In an ideal world, of course, all specifications would be perfect from the get-go, and their implementation in user agents would be immediate and flawless. In a slightly more down-to-earth version of an ideal world, browser vendors would immediately integrate regularly updated standards into new user agents—and users would have instant access to the latest version of those browsers without having to lift a finger.”
When I read that I thought “Doesn’t my antivirus software do this every day?” Each day at 2 AM it downloads an updated database of virus information and automatically installs it. Maybe the thing to do for Microsoft (and others) is to create a “standards database” that can be updated every so often automatically by the application.
In fact this could easily function as an improvement of or extension to the Firefox/IE/Opera update mechanism that alerts me that a new version is available. Just tell me that an updated “DTD entry” is available and tell me to install it. Or even better, have the browser automatically pull it down and install it.
(yes, this is pretty much a copy of another comment. The more times I say it the better chance someone will see it.)
Mike Lowry
I’ll second Keri in post 31. Let the sites break and the users upgrade their browsers.
I remember that I was expected to upgrade to Netscape 4 when a lot of sites started using frames. We’ve all learned that frames are obnoxious and not a good idea in general, but the point was in order to use the new feature I had to upgrade. I think the same thing applies now just as much as it did when all of the browsers started supporting frames. If you want to take advantage of new browser features I say you must upgrade. I think standardized rendering is a feature worth upgrading for.
Of course upgrading will only work if the “new” browsers actually adhere to a common and standard specification.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Microsoft for making my job as a web developer as difficult as possible, with the likelihood of becoming impossible in the near future.
james vreeland
I can’t imagine that nested engines would lead to anything close to a stable product. Even assuming that somehow developers get the standard browser implementation of IEn running as IE7 to work as expected, there are still the other myriad uses of the IE engine to worry endlessly about.
Given that this type of support would almost certainly need additional overhead, how would a move like this affect the development of the browser for mobile devices, embedded systems and integrated browsers (like Help sections)? It is surely hard enough to get a browser to function under these conditions, let alone once you add increasing levels of complexity and a fixed hardware platform.
How would you suggest even approaching things like embedded systems where you know conclusively that an browser will not change versions? ‘lite’ installs with single version support?
Kimi Wei
Browser switching is probably MS’s response to losing market share to better web-standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla/Firefox.
The hooks:
1 For developers: Throw a spanner into the pot so developers need to spend even more time coding to IE’s peculiarities. They might be kept so busy they won’t have time to develop for other browsers.
2 For the public: Why ever use anything other than IE? It becomes the only browser capable of reaching backward and forward in time.
Blah. More posturing. More MS complications. More reason for web standards development to keep moving forward.
Glen M
The most telling aspect of this article is that it reads more like an apology than an endorsement. It’s almost as if Eric Meyer threw up his hands in exasperation and said, “Sorry guys, I know there are a lot of problems with the idea, but this is the best we can do given the circumstances.”
As much as I respect Mr. Meyer, I’m going to have to disagree. We can and should expect better.
Matt Turner
It’d be much more useful if Microsoft and other browsers made better resources available to web developers.. how about the latest versions of the code, e.g. http://nightly.webkit.org/
How about releasing development versions of OLD browsers that would enable developers to run multiple versions of FF, IE, whatever on the same machine for testing purposes.
How about some simplified matrices of what features have been updated, how rendering has change from browser to browser, lists of developer friendly info on fixing rendering issues etc.
Maybe if Microsoft released a developer toolbar that didn’t suck, maybe even a javascript debugger (or at least a good logger) that doesn’t require visual studio.
That’s the kind of stuff that as a developer, i would find genuinely helpful. There is plenty of room for improvement in other areas without going down this road.
Chris Hester
The browser wars may be back if this proposal goes ahead. If so, do battle with words. Let Microsoft know we are NOT happy with this idea, which may well stagnate large parts of the web, locked into IE-only sites designed for out-of-date browser versions.
I’ve made a range of “t-shirt designs”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherhester/sets/72157603847933333/ suitable for the oncoming battle. Let’s all join forces and combat this growing threat. Don’t let Microsoft control the web and hold back standards!
Kirk Brown
There are a number of good points made in the responses to this post. I have a few thoughts of my own:
My own recommendation would be to use HTML 5 as a breakthrough point. At this point in time, force the doctype to be strictly HTML 5. Everything made before this time would be HTML 4 or earlier and would have quirks. Have no “quirks” mode for HTML 5. If the markup is wrong, let the browser show a failure.
I’d also recommend the doctype for HTML 5 include the numeral “5”. Should a future standard break HTML 5 rules, browsers would know to use HTML 5. If you write a faulty program, it’s going to crash. If you don’t write web page correctly, it shouldn’t display.
I see no reason to use the meta tag to target specific browsers. Many users upgrade to the latest browsers. Some are slower to adopt than others.
With the meta tag solution, would subversions be compatible under the major number or separately numbered? IE5 / IE5.01 / IE5.5 anyone?
What I truly think would make a better solution is to have pages tagged with standard numbers. For example:
<standards>
<standard name=“HTML” versi >
<standard name=“CSS” versi >
<standard name=“ECMAScript” versi >
</standards>
That way, the browser would know exactly what versions of each technology were coded into a page. This would also encourage page writers to think about the standards being used. Authoring tools would also become more compliant.