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.
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
Eric Meyers has more information on this story.
