April 1, 2008, 3:23 pm
Standards vs. Compatibility
by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Implementation, Technology, Web Interface Design
Joel Spolsky offers a look ahead at Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. What he foresees is a web developer flamewar.
Headed by developer Dean Hachamovitch, the MSIE 8 team has decided to move its default mode away from MSIE 7 compatibility and closer to web standards. Spolsky offers a long quote from Hachamovitch’s announcement of this decision, but it boils down to this:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.
This means that some HTML pages coded to take advantage of some of MSIE 7’s quirks will break in MSIE 8.
This is a problem? It shouldn’t be.
Barring the introduction of any new quirks (say a new way to misinterpret the box model), there’s no reason any Web site HTML and CSS should break in MSIE 8. If a web site has been tested against MSIE 6, MSIE 7, Firefox, and Safari (as are all of our public-facing projects), and if its developers have used a robust HTML structure and the subset of mutually-supported CSS styles (rather than browser-sniffing to write specialty CSS), then the odds of that site rendering incorrectly in MSIE 8 should be very small.
JavaScript-driven functionality, however, is harder to predict. Here, I rely on the folks behind Prototype and jQuery to handle MSIE 8 so I won’t have to. We’ll see how that goes.
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