Buzz Out Loud Lounge: IE 8 info clarification

IE 8 info clarification

Unless I misunderstood the information, what was said on episode 668 and 669 about Internet Explorer 8 was wrong.

IE 8 behaves mostly the way IE 7 does, and you can enable the standard-compliant mode by adding a 'meta' tag to your web page.

(If I understood correctly, in 669 Tom suggested Microsoft "could" do this, and Molly said "but of course they won't")


This (admittedly non-standard) meta tag can be added automatically by the web server for all the pages. It's easy to implement and opt-in.

Why is it done this way? Because almost all pages and javascript libraries assume "Explorer" is the IE6, and not standard compliant. They can't deal with a new Explorer that is compliant. They are programmed to assume the browser is either IE (non standard), or it's standard compliant.


In IE 7, they tried to use the standard DOCTYPE tag, which allows specifying that a page is standard compliant.

They later realized that this "Yes, I'm compliant" tag were set for most pages, often by web-editing tools, even when the pages were not actually standard-compliant.


That's why there is 3 modes : IE 6, IE 7 (uses DOCTYPE), and Standard Compliant.

MS worked with a W3.org group (http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/01/ie8-versioning-mechanism.html) and third-parties to come up with the solution they have now. It's a compromise to not "break the web" too much. Businesses are still refusing to upgrade to IE7 as is!

But bon't take this information from me. Read about this from the Internet Explorer team's blog :

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx

and this helpful third-party article:

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

I hope this helps.. or annoy in an interesting way.