1 You almost have me convinced

It’s taken me much longer to come around than it did for you. Ultimately, I still won’t be holding my breath to see how good the standards support is in IE8 until the beta is public. Only then can I prove to myself that it works as it’s advertised today.

posted at 05:53 am on February 19, 2008 by John Lascurettes

2 hacks forever?

I still can’t decide whether this is a good thing or not. The main concern is that until the majority are using IE8+, for a good few years we’ll still need to incorporate the IE6/7 hacks. The temptation for lazy developers will then be to use the meta tags to freeze IE at 7, rather than test and code for yet another version.

posted at 08:13 am on February 19, 2008 by nick crossland

3 Stuck in 2006 forever?

While IE is catching up with the standard support provided by others in 2006, this is fine. But how do the IE6 quirks translate to standards not yet supported at all, like SVG, MathML, and future W3C specs? Few professional web developers will be allowed to skip the next big thing, but how can you display new content types in a broken model without learning additional hacks?

posted at 08:46 am on February 19, 2008 by Victor Engmark

4 I'm Ok With It

I only just discovered web-standards (and now I’ve become somewhat obsessed with them), but it seems to me that the only people that are really going to have a bad time with Version Targeting are Microsoft: they’re the ones who’ll have to look after the code that does the different rendering, they’re the ones who’ll have to keep on making IE bulkier, they’re the ones who are going to lose market share because their browser is ten times the size of anyone elses. That doesn’t bother me really. I can put one tag into my header and not have to worry about IE. Sounds great!

posted at 08:48 am on February 19, 2008 by Mark Wales

5 Untitled

...millions of small business owners, school teachers, pastors, coaches, and so on … create websites every day, armed with crappy software and little else.

What you’re saying makes sense, but carries the very big assumption that all those uneducated developers (or non-developers, to be more precise) have already fixed their sites for IE7. Because, if they haven’t, the only way they are going to benefit from version targeting is by opting-in with an IE6 setting. Which, obviously, they’re not likely to do. So their sites are still going to be broken.

I’d be very interested to see some figures from Microsoft on the numbers/percentage of sites affected (or “broken”) by IE7’s release, and how many of them have since put in place fixes for that browser. I’d bet that, as a proportion of all sites on the web, the figure is pretty small.

posted at 09:27 am on February 19, 2008 by Matthew Pennell

6 web design would be boring without :)

... Seriously though – given time to think about this (as well as digesting the thoughts of people far smarter and more experienced than me) I reckon this will change very little in the short term. And in the long run, it seems like the practical solution is to continue gently educating anyone who can (or will) be educated!

posted at 09:38 am on February 19, 2008 by andi farr

7 Why can't browsers check for compliance after page load

Is it just wishful thinking, but is it not possible that a browser could load a page in standards mode. In the background another component of the browser could run through the site’s code and check for any non-standards script/markup. If it found serious problems (using some kind of fuzzy logic to decide when the problems amount to being serious) a pop-up warns the user that the site might need reloading, and asks them if they want to re-render in quirks mode.

posted at 09:42 am on February 19, 2008 by Rhys Evans

8 Still no discussion about meta vz http

I have spent hours reading blogs, articles and comments in vain to see if anyone else has spotted this technical problem. The current proposal says that an http-equiv metatag should be able to override a real http header.

That is exactly the opposite behavior compared to charset, and probably against the specs. I see that MS have made their minds up about this switch per se, but could anyone who has their ear at least try to get them to revert this detail?

posted at 09:47 am on February 19, 2008 by Lars Gunther

9 MS in pickle. But will this affect other browsers?

Microsoft is certainly in a tricky situation. But Ian Hixie had an interesting point that other browsers may have to support this no matter what, even if they didn’t want to, so this might have a wider ramification. But a number of people have noted that using the HTML 5 doctype will trigger standards compliant mode in IE (even now), so maybe that is a way we can still use progressive enhancement…? I tried to explain these further here: http://www.onenaught.com/posts/52/ie8-meta-switch-ie7

posted at 10:30 am on February 19, 2008 by Anup Shah

10 "you get to skip testing in future versions of IE."

No, you don’t. Unless you trust MS to have got the impl. of the switch correct, which they can not do 100% of the time. And trust MS just seems to end in pain, most of the time.

I 2nd the point upstream about this switch not helping sites that might break, because those sites are the very ones that need the switch adding, where the correct solution is to write them correctly. They’ll have to get someone in to do some work – would you rather they added the latest IE specific hack, or fixed it ?

posted at 10:48 am on February 19, 2008 by Tom Chiverton