Comments on: IE8 Compatibility with X-UA-Compatible

By: Jerome Lapointe

Jerome Lapointe — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:14:39 +0000

There’s probably something I dont understand… they can’t possibly mean that IE7& or IE8 will be the default engine for all doctypes… even those yet to be written…
HTML9 (when it comes out) will default to IE7?

What we’re doing is going back to pre-standard ERA… and we will be building for the browser, not the standard. People are gonna start posting these ridiculous little icons saying “Optimized for IEx”, “Works best in FFx”… You build you site for something the industry agree’s on not for a particular browser.

This is a very insidious proposal.
It’s a bandaid to support old-web… don’t compromise new-web for it… unless what you really want is to return to the old days of browser specific sites.
There’s ways you can tell if someone intends his site to be up to date on the latest standards… you do not need them to opt out to be able to server their site with the lastest engine.

By: Jerome Lapointe

Jerome Lapointe — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:52:42 +0000

I’m not against the meta tag itself… what I hate is being forced to deal with it if I want to run in standards mode… on the latest engine.

I could accept that a document that is HTML 4.0 (even strict if need be) or lower is defaulted to “IE7″ complience… However as for XHTML 1.0 strict and HTML5… the default should be as started by the doctype… meaning their equivalent of defining it as “edge”.

Let’s not start off these new standards on the wrong foot especially in the “strict” modes.

By: Chris Phillips

Chris Phillips — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:41:41 +0000

So let me get this straight. The excuse Chris Wilson gave at the AJAX Experience for IE7 running in standards compliant mode not being really standards compliant was because MS was worried it would break his momma’s banking site cause those developers didn’t really know what they were doing when they used the strict doctype.

Now that IE8 claims to be actually standards compliant the reason we developers have to use IE8 specific meta-tags to turn it on (in addition to the doctype for the other browsers) is because MS is worried it will break IE7?

Give me a break MS!

BTW what is the behavior if a developer uses this meta tag but forgets the doc-type, a standards mode page in IE8 but a quirks mode page in IE7 & other browsers?

By: SiteSmart

SiteSmart — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:55:13 +0000

It owuld have been far better to enable the new “better” stanards in regular standards mode becuase really IE7 standards mode is not that much better than IE6.

By: SchizoDuckie

SchizoDuckie — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:23:29 +0000

If only they would have made the opt-in for standards mode default and the opt-out optional… It would have been so rediculously simple to make a webserver that serves your “Ie 6 sp1.2a compatible” intranet site automatically (or by meta in templates) serve the compatibility header. That way, everyone but microsoft and the guru’s would be happy.

The web should evolve with every new browser release, not develove…