by Kyle Weems 23.January 2008 12:48
On of my favorite moments in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was when the various newspersons in the movie were gathered around their boss yelling about a decision they disagreed with. When it came time for mentally deficient weatherman Brick's turn, all he could conceive of was to yell "Loud noises!" I'm not trying to come across as an overwhelmed newscaster with learning disabilities, but this week I'm feeling the same way.
On Jan 21, A List Apart featured the article Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 (and a related opinion piece by Eric Meyer) where Microsoft's plans are unveiled for handling browser version targeting in IE8 and beyond. Somewhere around five minutes later, the entire CSS community went bananas. To a lot of developers, the new doctype/meta tag toggle that's going in with IE8 is the new version of browsers sniffing, which doesn't involve people's crotches but does generate a lot of anger. Although I can understand why they might be upset, I don't understand why they're going insane with rage. Maybe I'm missing something, and I should just follow along and make some loud noises.
The basic rundown is that starting with IE8, the Internet Explorer browser will render a web page differently depending on a new meta tag that tells the browser what version of IE it's targeting. The idea is that there's roughly six-zillon websites out there that have been poorly put together to accomodate the CSS-killing IE6 and IE7, and when IE8 rolls out with its higher version of compliance, it would start rendering all these sites and their various hacks incorrectly. In short, IE7 broke the web when it came out, and Microsoft doesn't want to do it again. So when IE8 looks at a page, and it doesn't have this fancy new meta tag, it'll examine the DOCTYPE tag and (if it's a doctype from the pre-IE8 era) it'll decide to render the page as IE7, thus preserving its appearance.
A lot of the angry developers are looking askance at this. After all, they're developing pages with forward-compatibility in mind, and good standards, and all that jazz. Why would they want their pages in IE8 to be rendered like they are in broken ol' IE7?
They don't.
But based on a lot of surveys, the majority of sites aren't being made with that forward-looking, standard-compliant viewpoint. IE8's version targeting will keep those sites intact, while allowing forward-looking developers to keep with the times and taking advantage of each IE version's new features.
Ultimately, I don't see how this is a bad thing. They're not asking us to reinvent the website making process. They are providing, however, a set of tools to automatically preserve the appearance of legacy sites while allowing cutting-edge developers to keep up with the times. (For the maverick, really bold developers, they even supply the <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> tag that'll automatically try to render the page in the newest browser version). I for one am waiting to pass judgement on this upcoming feature until I see it in practice. Based on all the fires that some are setting, though, it looks like the start of 2008 will involve a few web development witch hunts as people adjust.
Good? Bad? What's your thoughts?