IE8 and Web Standards

I have to give the Internet Explorer team credit: IE8 looks like it’s shaping up just fine. The news broke today that IE8 would render in standards mode by default.

We really couldn’t have asked for a better group of developers on the IE8 team - if for no other reason, because they’ve made a huge effort to listen to what people wanted and to deliver a product that satisfied the largest number of people it could. In doing so, they made one of their most controversial decisions as of late: to use version-targeting to determine how a webpage would be rendered, and to default to a non-standards-compliant rendering engine.

I personally don’t see the point of having three rendering engines in a browser, but that’s another story. Writing for A List Apart, Jeremy Keith makes a good argument for making the standards-compliant rendering engine the default one. To clarify the situation, I asked Chris Wilson what would happen if IE8 were to encounter a valid, well-formed document with a strict doctype he says. My worst fears were realized when he confirmed that the browser would behave exactly as if it were its predecessor.

What the IE team wanted to do was use a meta element to tell the browser how to render the page; if no such element were encountered, the browser would default to the IE7 rendering engine. This is a problem because we already have a way of telling browsers to render a standards-compliant version of the webpage: the doctype. If I’m developing a webpage, I don’t want—nor should I need—to include an extra element just to make it display correctly in IE8.

I won’t worry any longer, because the IE8 team has reversed their decision and decided to make the standards mode the default one. Now come IE8, our webpages can work in all browsers without hacks or conditional comments. This is a milestone for web designers and developers, and for the first time I’m eagerly awaiting the release of an Internet Explorer browser.