A List Apart

Issue № 251

Not your father’s standards switch: a special issue on version targeting and forward compatibility.

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8

by Aaron Gustafson253 Comments

For seven years, the DOCTYPE switch has stood designers and developers in good stead as a toggle between standards mode and quirks mode. But when IE7, with its greatly improved support for standards, "broke the web," it revealed the flaw in our toggle. The quest was on to find a more reliable ensurer of forward compatibility. Is version targeting the answer?

More from A List Apart

Columnists

Karen McGrane on Content

The Alternative is Nothing

We’re witnessing one of the latest waves of technological disruption, as mobile devices put access to the internet in the hands of people who previously never had that power.

From the Blog

Ughck. Images.

In a follow-up to his ALA article Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems, Dave Rupert talks about all the progress we've made toward responsive image solutions — by which he means no progress has been made.

daverupert.com

Google Changes Rankings of Smartphone Search Results

Google has started decreasing the ranking of sites with misconfigured mobile content redirects and errors. Highly recommended for any developer who cares about site rankings in Google (i.e. all of them).

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com