“In a slightly more down-to-earth version of an ideal world, browser vendors would immediately integrate regularly updated standards into new user agents—and users would have instant access to the latest version of those browsers without having to lift a finger.”

When I read that I thought “Doesn’t my antivirus software do this every day?” Each day at 2 AM it downloads an updated database of virus information and automatically installs it. Maybe the thing to do for Microsoft (and others) is to create a “standards database” that can be updated every so often automatically by the application.

In fact this could easily function as an improvement/extension of the Firefox update mechanism that alerts me that a new version is available. Just tell me that an updated “DTD entry” is available and tell me to install it. Or even better, have the browser automatically pull it down and install it.

Comment also posted on IEblog, Surfin’ Safari, article comment pages.

The concern I have with digital media isn’t that new formats have to support all previous technologies. Rather, we need to figure out ways to keep materials in older formats readable. If that means “porting” a CD’s content to Blu-Ray, so be it.

When it comes to hypertext, it doesn’t seem to be that unreasonable to be able to inform rendering engines how to handle legacy information, especially since web technologies are far more microevolutionary than other digital media formats.

But I keep coming back to broken is broken. Standards are standards. Browser version sniffing is browser version sniffing. Putting lipstick on a pig is does not really help the pig or the make up artist.

So I struggle trying to understand who this could possibly benefit.

The workarounds put in place to help the dysfunctional IE family look good in public have been short circuited by IE7. Is this the fault of anyone in particular? The web is littered with the concessions that designers made to make IE look good. It is also littered with web sites that will never look good/work in any browser ever made.

Is it reasonable to expect web site design to be so simple that anyone can do it? Pick one up at your local Shop-O-Rama, fill in the blanks and you are good to go. No need to worry about the messy technical details. Is that what we want web design to be? Is it even possible? History and experience says no. All the horrible

If Uncle Leo and the amateur web community never cared enough to work with doctypes, what makes anyone think that they will ever understand and use version switches? The argument that this is the community being served seems bogus.

IE7 breaking the web is not the fault of standards or doctypes or quirks mode or standards mode. It is clear what is deficient here and version dependent rendering does not solve the problem. It further complicates the issue and introduces another layer of MS generated spaghetti.

It seems like the web community is always making concessions to MS. Why, just once, can’t MS make a marketing move that will benefit the web community as a whole, and not just its own bottom line.

The Quirks Mode switch was required because Internet Explorer had a completely wrong and buggy implementation of most of the CSS2 specification as well as a wide range of software producing web pages targetting and relying on these bugs. The reason Internet Explorer 7 had problems with backwards compatibility even in Standards Mode was because it took 6 freaking years before it was done and released, so in the meantime Internet Explorer 6′s errors had been hard wired in every web developer’s minds, every CMS and every template made during those dark age years.

The fact that Internet Explorer 8 needs such a switch is an admission and confirmation of the fact that Internet Explorer 7 is full of bugs too. That unless IE8 reproduces the same bugs as IE7, it will break web pages. I agree IE7 isn’t perfect. I could fill several pages with descriptions of errors and shortcomings in IE7. Still, IE7 is so much better than IE6 that it doesn’t really matter. At least not unless Microsoft expects to keep IE8 in development for another 4 years. I don’t think they do.

If people really want to tailor their crap (it is crap if they do, honestly) against a given rendering engine, then let them add a switch. You shouldn’t “opt in” to support standards. If anything, you should “opt out”. If Microsoft wants to provide a hack people can deploy to opt out of reading or even knowing what a W3C Recommendation is, then fine. But forcing all of us doing The Right Thing to hard code and tailor our sites to a specific version of the Triden rendering engine is nothing but pure and utter madness. Plus, it’s a spit in the face, a punch in the kidney, a kick in the head and a serious offense to every web developer in the world that has commited to standards and heard Microsoft’s Chris Wilson’s fairytales about them commiting too.

In 1999 developers used tables (and other cool and hip HTML features, of which you know). Only because they could easily build something that looked and behaved just the way they wanted without too much of an effort.

Now we build with standards. And only because we can easily build websites using standards that look and function as expected in most of the browsers without much of an effort. Except IE, of course. Fortunately we now have enough knowledge to make it behave like standards aware browser with just a few lines of CSS or extra HTML markup which doesn’t hurt anybody.

Finally Microsoft gives us something that doesn’t require a special care — IE 7. Why spoil this great evolution of IE and the Web, and ask for a treat for the upcoming versions?

Every web developer will know about a new version of IE being released by Microsoft, even those who don’t know what Web Standards mean, and those for whom the HTML is generated by a CMS.

Isn’t this the moment we all have been waiting for — the Web dominated by the Standards based websites, and having the quirky ones as a minority. This is the day when Microsoft should put all their marketing money in an effort of declaring that standards are good. Whether stating that invalid sites make your computer unsafe or using other reasons that could be easily picked up by the general public.

Is it?

The meta idea might work ok if the default for IE8 is standards compliance, and the meta only has to be added to legacy sites. Forcing everyone to add this tag to their sites just to support IE8 is stupid, vindictive and frankly just a step too far.

The root problem here is Microsoft’s culture of ‘release buggy, fix later’. If they can’t manage to create a standards compliant browser it’s time they got out of the game and stopped holding the web back.

If the website is indeed worth preserving, let it be redesigned and leave archiving to sites like: http://web.archive.org.

Like Nintendo, support the new and the next most previous version, but in 2 to 3 years mark that baby down on Black Friday and blow it out the door…!

just short thoughts, pretty much the usual.

J.

Or do you think some developers will remain ignorant of web standards and will continue to code for bugs in old versions of IE (whether or not they even realize that that’s what they’re doing when they create CSS without understanding how it works, and “test” their work only in one version of IE)?

Sure, some will. But the necessary pain of realising that what they’ve done is wrong, currently experienced when their users try out Firefox or upgrade to Vista, is one of the most powerful motivators in fighting that ignorance.

Microsoft clearly see the developers you describe as their key audience — “don’t break the web” means “default to legacy, because our most important clients are dinosaurs”.

But if you consider an issue like accessibility, then breakage is the best chance of inspiring that clueless developer to buy your book, start using standards, and support more than one browser.

-wrong wrong wrong.