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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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..
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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”
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.)
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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.
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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!
Copy & paste the code below to embed this comment.
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 ArticleRick 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.