IE8 has change of heart

March 4, 2008 | Published in: Out of the Blue | Tags: , , , 6

As you may or may not have been aware there has been controversy in the web design community lately about IE’s “opt-in” policy to IE8’s improved web standards rendering (see this post on ALA). Basically, Microsoft were going to make developers add a meta tag to their web pages to make them render in IE8 Standards mode; without it, IE8 would only render in IE7 mode.

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

IE Blog

Well, yesterday it was announced that Microsoft had changed their minds and made it an “opt-out” policy instead meaning sites will render in IE8 mode unless told not to. Good news in my opinion, as I believe it will increase the popularity of standards based design in the long term.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly

IE Blog

Eric Meyers has more information on this story.

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6 Responses to “IE8 has change of heart”

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  • 1 - JAB_au says: Reply to this comment

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    Must say this is a good move by Microsoft, however you would think that instead of making new tags for us to use they could actually focus on making it follow standard properly.

    Comment made on April 17, 2008 at 12:06 pm

  • 2 - Milorad says: Reply to this comment

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    it’s easy to knock microsoft over this issue, but do try to keep in mind that there are many many millions of pages coded specifically to handle IE’s quirks.

    just suddenly supporting standards without backwards compatibility for the broken-standards would be irresponsible to web developers who have worked so hard, and cried so much about IE’s bugs for so many years.

    This is going to magically fix the pages of people who don’t give a crap about IE, but it will cause more work for people who have worked hard to code around IE’s issues.

    Comment made on April 30, 2008 at 7:58 pm

  • 3 - Phil says: Reply to this comment

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    Well, if MS had stuck to the standards from the beginning, they wouldn’t be in this mess, nor would millions of web designers, annoyed by the typical M lack of ’sticking to standards’.

    Just my $0.02

    Comment made on May 19, 2008 at 3:46 am

  • 4 - strony internetowe wrocław says: Reply to this comment

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    nice site many useful informations thx

    Comment made on September 26, 2008 at 2:05 pm

  • 5 - amber shop says: Reply to this comment

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    really great tutorial.This is going to magically fix the pages of people who don’t give a crap about IE, but it will cause more work for people who have worked hard to code around IE’s issues. thx

    Comment made on March 2, 2009 at 11:33 pm

  • 6 - obsługa kart płatniczych says: Reply to this comment

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    This is going to magically fix the pages of people who don’t give a crap about IE, but it will cause more work for people who have worked hard to code around IE’s issues.

    Comment made on March 13, 2009 at 10:50 am

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