If you're a standards-aware web designer, and you have a pulse, then you may have noticed that on January 21st the whole industry started frothing at the mouth like a viking beserker chewing on his shield just before he sacks a monastary (as I mention here). The reason for this whole brouhaha was the unveiling of Microsoft's planned meta tag for IE8 and beyond to prevent a number of backwards compatibility issues with IE6 & 7 optimized sites.
I'm going to let the various rants that are linked via my old post speak for themselves. I've decided (after a day or so of ruminating) that everything will be fine for three reasons.
- Microsoft probably will do what it wants regardless of what I think, so no amount of complaining on my part'll matter.
- The new meta tag will actually let me test sites in IE6 without using a VM (until IE6 loses a lot more of the market share, this will continue to be a major part of my job).
- There's a way to avoid the whole "opt in to opt out" issue that people are foaming, raving, and biting small dogs over.
One little fact that a lot of angry designers have overlooked is that IE won't always render a site like IE7 if you don't include the new meta tag. It'll only do this if you don't include the tag AND the doctype tag is of the current variety used today. If it's an unknown doctype or newer doctype, then it'll render in the up-to-date, standards-compliant fashion (as mentioned by John Rezig here).
If only we had a doctype tag to do this for us.
Wait... we do! It's the HTML5 doctype tag. This is pretty complex, so get a pen to write this down.
<!DOCTYPE html>
No, really, that's it. That's the doctype for HTML5, and the really nice part about it is that all modern browsers (IE, FF, Opera, etc) will switch into standards mode if they see that. You don't even need to worry about using new HTML5 tags or support for such. You can continue to make the sites you're making the way you're used to making them, and the site will render in the newest browser in a standards-compliant way with no extra tags or work on your part.
Since we're all going to be switching to this tag at some point (I'm thinking I might be doing it sooner rather than later to avoid all this mess), I think we've found that maybe things aren't so bad as they look.
