IE8 and Web Standards

By Joshua on January 29 2008

Photo by Martin Kliehm (license)

If you've been paying attention to web design news in the past week, you probably know that the web standards community has been having quite a bit of debate about a new feature of Internet Explorer 8. The controversy was kicked off by two articles on A List Apart: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, as well as an opinion piece from Eric Meyer called From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey.

Basically, the news amounts to this. Beginning with IE8, Internet Explorer will support a new meta tag which allows the author of a web page to specify the rendering engine that they would like to use, and if none is specified, to default to IE7's rendering engine.

Web standards purists are complaining because it seems to violate some important tenets of designing with web standards, such as the idea that browsers should render code according to the HTML and CSS specs to the best of its ability, allowing progressive enhancement.

Interestingly, A List Apart's writers, including Jeffrey Zeldman (a founder of the web standards movement), seem to be in favor of this change to IE. Why? They point out that Internet Explorer has actually had something similar to this for a while in the doctype switch. (Basically, IE checks for a properly formed doctype and renders the page in standards mode if it finds one. If not it defaults to quirks mode. Sound familiar?) And they note that the doctype switch was essential to IE6's success in becoming the most standards compliant browser of its time. Furthermore, those web designers who want to maintain their current way of working can always use the "edge" keyword, which will tell future versions of IE to display in the very latest version of the rendering engine.

Pros

Basically, I'm in agreement with Zeldman and Meyer on this issue. I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs if the IE team can successfully implement this feature. It will mean among other things that…

• Sites that were developed before the latest version of IE won't break (unless they live on the "edge")
• Designers/developers will have the ability to switch their sites over to the latest rendering engine when they choose rather than when Microsoft chooses
• Those who are aware of web standards have the opportunity to continue practicing progressive enhancement techniques if they choose

Cons

Despite what I mentioned above, I do have a couple of concerns, namely…

• The growing size of IE's footprint as it maintains more and more old versions of its rendering engine
• The possibility that the IE team may not be able to successfully maintain the old rendering engines in new versions of IE, resulting in a multitude of similar, but not identical rendering engines for designers to deal with.

I'm curious as to what other designers and developers think about the subject. Which side do you tend to come down on? Any pros or cons I've overlooked? Post a comment and let me know!