I don't discriminate

All browsers have their quirks and bloody irritating bugs... I've seen CSS and Javascript discrepancies across FF, Opera and IE... I've had to adjust portions of code to accomodate either of these browsers while the other 2 work fine

Unless a single rendering engine is developed and forced into all browsers (which never will and never *should* happen) there are always going to be issues that trip up a single browser (or group of browsers)

Besides, rather than blame my own code it's much nicer to be able to swear at browsers until I figure out the [usually] braindead mistake I've made

Such is life... Rather than complaining about the inconsistencies I think we should be thankful that at least we have one area of choice the UK Gov't hasn't restricted

@ Mark (Re: How about you all read instead of flaming MS?)

"No, how about YOU READ!

You have to put the tag in because IE8 by default renders in "quirks" mode, i.e. like IE7. So if you write a standards compliant page but forget to put this tag in, it will render as badly as IE7 did."

Er no, he had it right. You have it wrong, Mark. IE8 will render in standards mode by default, the presence of the tag makes it 'IE7 compatible' - using the older rendering engine.

@Christopher Emerson

You seem to be right. As long as *this* blog is correct and not the official previous statement by Microsoft on their blog site.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx

which says

" 1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.

2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.

3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article."

Indicating that there are three modes: IE7 nearly-compliant is default. IE6 and earlier is another tag. And the *properly* compliant version needs a different tag.

Does this change also mean that IE8 will now pass ACID 2?

Posted by kdawson on Tue Jan 22, 2008 05:04 PM

"In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."

Martian Headsets...

"You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang around a tree."

Read the whole article at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html.

@Mark

Yes, that was the way they WERE going to do it, but they changed their minds and made it support standards by default some time in... March maybe? So yes, it passes ACID 2.

Standards are good, m'kay?

For the confused, it used to be an opt-in to make IE8 act properly, but lots of web developers got really cross and Microsoft appear to have changed it so that standards compliance is the default now. Which is a good thing, and they actually deserve some praise for that (Satan is now reaching for his thermal undies due to a sudden cold snap ;-) ).

"…if Microsoft has done as promised with IE 8, those of us who've been doing it all properly for years won't have to lift nary a finger when IE 8 hits the streets."

This is why I make the effort to do things the right way with website development and follow the standards. I can get a site to work properly in Opera, Firefox and Safari without any odd browser-specific hacks or major headaches. Sure, they all have their rendering problems, but I haven't had to throw in any specific hacks for anything besides [gag] IE6, and stuff tends not to break with new browser versions.

Of course this assumes IE8 doesn't have it's own set of problems which cause all-new pain and suffering, or that Microsoft don't just do some sort of half-baked implementation like they've tended to do in the past.

I can't say I feel sorry for the poor slobs who think standards and validation are for losers and who might run into trouble with the new browser; they, and their nasty broken code are the causes of all this trouble. May they experience a world of pain...

Nobody cares about your standards.

Nobody posting here seems to be picking up on the point that IE8 is going to break a tremendous amout of sites out there (which won't have this special tag). I specifically don't use Firefox because it breaks so many sites. I mean, you can moan all you like that those sites should have been coded to standards, but at the end of the day I don't give a toss about your beloved standards - I just want to browse to a site and for it not to be broken.

NO CONSUMER GIVES A TOSS ABOUT YOUR BELOVED STANDARDS.

IE8 will break many sites. This is a bad thing.

Nobody cares about your standards.

Frum osten fertoofle! Mis enkel pon resto imacto tellesto iten.

Or in a standard language: Who cares about what you say! If we can't understand you it's worthless.

@Francis Vaughan

Well you forgot the one every other browser has to do:

Tell the webserver what browser it is.

That's what other browsers have to do to get IE-baed sites where the web designer has then tried to get a portable webpage. But there's no way to tell from the server side whether it is IE8, IE7 or earlier. Because MS doesn't think there's a difference: you should ALWAYS be writing for IE according to their cannon.

If they'd identified the browser properly (even if it was a new term, say the renderer name, rather than the application: after all, MS does now say that IE can be removed, but the renderer has to stay, so they must be different, right?), then those sites that only cater for IE6 will know it won't look good on that browser 'cos it's not IE6.

If they want to keep "IE6 non-compliant" and "IE7-that-we-said-was-compliant-but-wasn't-really" as available, then the browser can switch to that mode and identify itself to that level of compliance. By user decision.

No change to websites needed unless you don't want to update your old crappy site.

But the IE8 beta...

Is awful. I installed it on my computer briefly and it rendered almost everything that used a 'float' incorrectly. So I'm waiting on the second beta that actually renders stuff correctly before I fully 'hooray' Microsoft.

Mark, you're wrong again

I'm surprised that you can't tell the difference between Internet Explorer versions on the server side, because I've been doing it for years with 100% success.

I think you've got the complete wrong end of the stick here:

"No change to websites needed unless you don't want to update your old crappy site"

That's exactly it. If you have a completely standards compliant site then you don't need to add this meta tag. If, on the other hand, you've got a cackhanded site that was tailored for IE6 (as many corporate web applications are) you slip the code in and it'll continue to display as it did in IE6/7. So basically, everyone wins.

I really don't know why everyone is kicking up such a fuss- and I'm a professional web dev type.

The Only Proper Response To MS IE8 Statements

Bullshit

re: re: Mark, you're wrong again

Gee I've never heard someone on here say so much and get it all so wrong. Think about it.

If you do browser sniffing on the server you need all your pages to be scripted (either server-side or client side) and you need to write a different version for every browser, or create checks for each object that might render differently (similar to how it is done now). This puts all the onus on the developer to do a lot of work if they did not write a standards compliant version already.

Using a meta tag gets the browser to do the work. The browser (IE8) renders the page as IE7 or standards compatible depending on the tag.

This tag could be added to completely unscripted pages very easily and that is all the work you will have to do. A sensible solution is (as has already been suggested) to add the tag to all your pages now and then remove it when IE8 is released and you have tested them properly.

The difference is getting the browser to do alternate rendering work.

To the guy with the 60,000 web pages to change. You can't be much of a developer if all your pages are written from scratch with no universal templates or you can think of a way to automatically add the meta header tags without re-writing every single page.

@Mark

I think you are looking at the from the wrong perspective. In an ideal world, everyone would code to standards and the release of IE8 would be a non issue. Unfortunately, the majority of sites out there don't use standards. Yes, this is the developers fault, and they SHOULD be using standards, and it IS their fault, but you are looking at it from the developers point of view.

Now look at it from the users point of view. Your average user will upgrade to IE8 because Windows Update told them to, and start browsing the web with it. Then they find all the sites that used to work, suddenly don't. This is of course the developers fault, but the users won't see it that way - they will think it's the browser that is 'broken' and has bugs. So what are they going to do? Use something else / go back to IE7.

As much as its 'fun' to say 'well serves MS right' and as much fun as it is to bash MS for previous browsers, it just doesn't make sense for them to lose all the IE market. Instead of just saying 'well we will carry on rendering it the old IE way', they are meeting developers half way - they are taking a big risk in the name of keeping the web developers happy here. I don't think people quite appreciate or understand how far MS are stretching to meet our demands. They are saying that IE8 will render everything in full standards mode, and provide webmasters with an optional switch to trigger IE's 'old' rendering mode. This way, web developers don't have to rewrite sites (maybe it was a site written by someone else and taken on by them - not necessarily their fault that their site is crappy), while progressing the standards compliance of the browser and bringing it in line with the others.

Of course, you can just refuse to take part & use the switch, in which case MS will probably decide that leaving IE8 rendering the old way by default is their best plan. Noone wants this. They will be the first to admit that they made mistakes in the past (The fact that they have pledged full standards support should tell you this), but that isn't the issue here. The issue is how to get them back on the right path and make their browser better. What they are offering to help them get back in line is, I think, a great solution, and refusing to use that solution just because MS say you should is completely pointless, and will probably damage the chances of MS sticking with the 'standards by default' in IE8 plan.

5-10 years in the future when <IE8 is dead and used about as much as IE5 is today, everyone can forget about the 'bad' IE, the tag won't have to exist any more and everyone lives happily ever after.

Yes Mark, you're still wrong

I could code in a server-side browser detection for every page. But it'd be an obscene amount of work- I deal with a lot of pages that are just simple HTML files *without a server-side backend*- so I'd have to add one to every page, and probably waste a huge number of CPU cycles every day doing unnecessary processing.

Or, I could add a meta tag to the included template I use, which will appear on every page. I think I know what I'm going to do.

And your "point" is irrelevant, Alastair

Why does MS get a bye? One problem is that you have pages that nobody knows if it works with anything other than IE6.

So when is IE6 render compatability going to come out of IE? IE11? 10? 9?

And how about just making the page (and these will be OLD pages) compliant? You're going to have to do it some time and you're going to have to track them ALL down anyway.

@Mark

"Why does MS get a bye? One problem is that you have pages that nobody knows if it works with anything other than IE6."

Which is why Microsoft are trying to get the message out there and tell people, hence this story...

"So when is IE6 render compatability going to come out of IE? IE11? 10? 9?"

When IE7 (it's IE7 compatibility, not IE6) is hardly used any more.

"And how about just making the page (and these will be OLD pages) compliant? You're going to have to do it some time and you're going to have to track them ALL down anyway."

Because it just ISN'T going to happen. Businesses don't spend money changing things that work. When it needs a rewrite for other reasons, it'll be rewritten to the browsers of the day.

@Christopher Emerson

So most of the broken pages are for ones written waaay back when IE5 had won the Browser war and Frontpage was piling dogshit on the information superhighway.

IE7 was written when the Other Browsers had been a huge success. The only reason for IE7 to be created was because by sitting on their arse (MS had disbanded the IE team soon after Netscape died: IE is "free" you know [and worth every penny]) and Mozilla/Firefox, Opera and a few others had had time to adhere to standards and include browser UI functions that MS believed (and said at the time) were useless and unwanted by their customers.

Well, after the customers told them how much that was wrong by using FF/Opera and they took a large section of the browser world, IE7 was built. At the time, IE 7 was supposed to be the mutts nuts on compatibility and bringing new security and innovative UI features (like tabbed browsing...).

By then most pages had had to be rewritten to identify whether it was not IE reading and act appropriately. The market share of non-IE was big enough that "upgrade to IE6 or later" was no longer a sane choice for an internet presence.

So IE came out and sites already either were abandoned to IE6 hell (often because they were old and busted rather than new and sexy) or were IE 7 (which had not lived up to the IE W3C compatibility hype) and checked the browser was not IE and produced a page that looked proper on them.

And you say that these pages which already HAVE "browser checking to make a W3C compliant page" and "Make IE busted junk page" should be modified to add a tag that makes IE8 (purportedly beautifully compliant with W3C) compatible.

I fail to see the reason here.

They already have code to make compliant pages from the base documents.

They already check for IE7 (or others) and produce a different page.

It's been vouchsafed here on El Reg that IE8 can identify itself uniquely different from IE at an earlier version.

Why do they need to add a tag to make IE8 look at the IE7 page? Why not put IE8 with the other compatible browsers and allow it to look at the W3C compliant pages?

Why?

@Mark

You are completely missing the point. This is not about servers that check the browser and serve up different pages depending on what it finds, that is a completely separate thing. This is about pages that were built for older IE versions which would break with a fully compliant engine. It was a problem with IE7. IE7 used doctype switching, to put it into 'standards mode' or 'quirks mode' (which is basically IE5 compatibility mode), as did IE6. Doctype switching has become less useful now and has big disadvantages, since even broken pages are getting them copied and pasted in mindlessly - it is no longer a useful way to tell compliant pages apart. Hence, this tag. If the tag is there, it will use doctype switching still to decide between IE7 standards mode or quirks mode (ie5 box model behaviour) to be compatible with the earlier versions. If the tag is not there, the page gets done in full standards mode.

This is NOTHING to do with browser sniffing on the server side.

@Christopher

You're missing the point.

That may be the point I'm making (along with any *competent* web developer), but you've missed that. You haven't given why these pages must be tagged so IE8 can render them like IE7 rather than just render like the other browsers do.

I may have missed your point, but your point merely seems to be "Well, IE is THE browser and we're too lazy to fix webpages".

@Mark

"You haven't given why these pages must be tagged so IE8 can render them like IE7 rather than just render like the other browsers do."

That is exactly what IE8 DOES do when the tag isn't present - render in standards mode, 'like other browsers'. The tag is for people who know their sites are built to work on previous IE versions to make sure a standards compliant browser won't break.

That isn't my point at all - I am a big standards advocate, but it just isn't realistic for MS to provide standards support, and not provide a way to make webpages still work that would otherwise break. There isn't a clear black/white picture here, it isn't a case of 'well people should fix their pages'. Yes, they should, but it just isn't going to happen - you have to look at it practically.

@Christopher Emerson

So why the need for the tab? You're viewing a page on IE8, not IE7.

@Mark

Yes... and IE8 will support standards which break pages built for earlier versions of IE. The tag tells it not to break them. Therefore the user is happy, doesn't switch browser because they think the browser is 'broken' and MS keep their users on board. If the tag wasn't there and IE8 supported standards, the users would abandon IE8 because it 'breaks' pages, and MS don't want that.

I really don't know how I can explain this any simpler than I have done...

Mark, seriously...

You don't code web pages for a living do you? Let me show you how the conversation would go with my boss if I did what you suggest:

"Hey, boss... IE8 is out now, and it renders web pages a lot better. Do you mind if I go back and remove the last two years of IE-specific hacks I've had to do all over the place?"

"Isn't there a quicker way? That'll cost loads!"

"Well, yes. I could just put a meta tag in. But it's not right."

"F*ck off. Do it."

The other issue you seem to be blindly ignoring is that all IE users don't magically upgrade to IE8 the second it comes out. It takes years- the sites I run still have around 60% IE6 usage, and IE7 has been out for ages. Just because IE8 appears doesn't mean that we can forget all the others exist.

Alastair, seriously for you

I do code for a living.

And would it be better to say "Hey, boss, IE8 is out now so we don't have to code for specific versions of Internet Explorer any more and we can put a tick in the box of 'ISO9000 compliance' and 'standards compliant website' to make our work more obviously quality if we rewrite the few bits of the website that were written to avoid bugs in IE7 or earlier".

You don't know how to talk to a boss. Maybe you don't code for a living?

Oh, no, the simpler explanation is that you wanted to make up both sides of a conversation to prove your point, not to see whether my point could be valid.

Twonk.

@Christopher Emerson

"IE8 will support standards which break pages built for earlier versions of IE."

Don't you mean

"Earlier versions of IE would break when given pages written to w3c standards"?

And unless you want to avoid 20%+ of the browser market, you'd be writing for FireFox, Opera and Safari (in Europe, it's nearer 40%), you already have a w3c standard page.

So get IE8 to look at that by, oh, NOT identifying it as IE7.

@Mark...

Don't you mean

"Earlier versions of IE would break when given pages written to w3c standards"?

No. Given that the w3c standards weren't finalised when the browsers we are talking about were released, its a bit unfair to blame the browser for not following them.

You don't seem to understand that IE8 is going to render in standards mode by default, you keep saying it shouldn't identify as IE7... well, it won't identify as IE7, and this tag has nothing to do with what the browser identifies as.

"And would it be better to say "Hey, boss, IE8 is out now so we don't have to code for specific versions of Internet Explorer any more and we can put a tick in the box of 'ISO9000 compliance' and 'standards compliant website' to make our work more obviously quality if we rewrite the few bits of the website that were written to avoid bugs in IE7 or earlier"."

Yes, because as soon as IE8 is released, every single IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and IE7 user is going to jump and start using it straight away, overnight.

Get real.

@Christopher Emerson

Well these pages will have to be removed when IE7 doesn't support some Necessary Feature. It will have to be removed when IE7 support is removed from IE9.

And continuing to persue IE7 only pages when IE7 is no longer supported (will be happening pretty soon) doesn't seem like a sensible idea.

Using the tag only postpones your pain and, because you can continue to make broken pages because you use the tag, increases the pain you will have to face.

So don't use the tag.

MS, don't offer the tag. Definitely don't recommend the tag.

@Mark

Who says the IE7 rendering mode will be removed from IE9? I don't think even MS will have made that decision yet.

You really don't get what seems to be going on. Using the tag means people can take time recoding their sites to work with more recent versions of IE, rather than having to quickly get it up to standards before IE8s release. There will be a period of time while they can have it in standards mode, or not.

And people aren't going to stop using IE7 'pretty soon' or just becasue it isn't supported. People still use IE5 in places, and that is now over 9 years old.

The intention is that people will start making standards compliant pages now that IE supports it, and pandering to IEs behaviour is unnecessary. Either that, or the tag will be around until the usage of the versions of IE that weren't standards compliant (<= IE7) is no longer significant, meaning people can still support these older versions.

There is no way that not having this tag would work, it would be counter productive for both the users and for MS. Can you REALLY not see this? I don't understand why you don't see that this is the best solution to the problem.

@Christopher

Who ever said it was?

That sholuld've been

...was being left in IE9.

Mark

You said:

"It will have to be removed when IE7 support is removed from IE9.". Noone has said it will be left in. I said noone knows what will happen with IE9, not even MS.

@Mark

No, there will be no need to include an IE8 engine in IE9 if it is standards compliant from then on, will there? Just keep the IE7 compatible mode in until people don't use it any more, then remove that too.

The IE7 engine uses doctype switching to account for earlier browsers (IE5 + IE6).

The tag is there for people who coded for older versions of IE, and not the standards compliant browsers out there at the moment, so 'putting IE8 with the three other W3C compliant browsers' is a bit useless.

There's only so many times I can respond to your questions, but trust me - this tag makes perfect sense. If you understand how it is working, and why it is needed, you would think the same. I suggest you try reading some other articles about it - of which there are quite a few around. You don't seem to understand the issue that MS face, and why they are using this solution.

@Christopher

O, I thought you just said nobody knew what was in IE9.

Was that a lie?

Or is this one?

The tag isn't needed. IE7 will not last forever and IE9 can't afford to take the baggage of IE7 along with it.

Trust me, the tag has no worth. Fix your pages. That's the freaking job of a web designer. And if you have pages that ONLY render in IE7, how do you use the competitive world and reduce costs if you can ONLY use Windows? Why are you (the CEO of a company) willing to continue to spend licensing money for an OS rather than put a little bit of work on making your webpages compliant and opening up opportunities that can be used to bargain a better deal at the very least with your OS supplier?

Please remember, IE7 was supposed (when it was vapour) be w3c compliant. When it was really released, it was touted as being much more compliant with w3c than IE6 and so you should upgrade ASAP to it.

So if it's any better, it's less of a job to make a page that's 100% compliant with IE8. After all, that's EXACTLY what you did with earlier pages: made them compliant with IE5, IE5.5, IE6 or IE7 as they became "the browser". You didn't have a problem with making your IE6 pages work on IE7. So why are you saying there's going to be problems making your IE7 pages work on IE8? Especially since then you can make pages that can be seen on the PDA's that only have Opera as its browser.

That is why there's no worth to the tag.

It isn't needed and should not be wanted. For those who DO want it, why not just keep to IE7 and forbid installation of a different browser? You're lazy enough to not want to do some minimal fixes but not lazy enough to refuse to change browser.

Mark

"Why are you (the CEO of a company) willing to continue to spend licensing money for an OS rather than put a little bit of work on making your webpages compliant and opening up opportunities that can be used to bargain a better deal at the very least with your OS supplier?"

Don't ask me these things, ask the people in question! The fact is, many companies with Internet Explorer as the only browser on their intranet, code internal applications to work with that browser. 'Why spend money and effort making them work in other browsers?' they will say. I know full well it is easy enough to do, my pages don't need fixing, don't mistake me for someone who codes IE-only sites.

A lot of companies are still using IE5 / IE6 because upgrading will cause things to break. IE8 will be a big change, and MS want to avoid 'breaking' these sites any more. It's not in anyone's interest for them to refuse to upgrade.

And I didn't say what would/wouldn't be in IE9, I just said that I thought there would be no need for an IE8 mode, which is the whole point of this.

You clearly have no clue of the practicalities involved, and why this is needed, and indeed welcome.

Remember that it isn't just an IE7 mode, depending on the doctype it is an IE5 mode, which many companies still rely on.

Trust ME, the tag has a LOT of worth for the advancement of web standards in general, and overcoming a barrier to getting there.

Mark

*sigh*... still don't get it?

The only thing I can do is repeat my answers from above, which you seem to have ignored...

You: "So why is it you've made up an ie7 explicit page but don't want to make an ie8 specific one? You did it before. You did it for ie6. You did it for ie5.5. And so on."

Me, above: "Remember that it isn't just an IE7 mode, depending on the doctype it is an IE5 mode, which many companies still rely on."

You: "The tac can do NOTHING for standards. How can it? It doesn't enforce ANY part of the W3C standard, it just lets you keep the NON-STANDARD page there. That's the OPPOSITE of "advancement of web standards". Advancement would be "use the freaking W3C standard". THAT would advance the standards."

Me, above: "Yes... and IE8 will support standards which break pages built for earlier versions of IE. The tag tells it not to break them. Therefore the user is happy, doesn't switch browser because they think the browser is 'broken' and MS keep their users on board. If the tag wasn't there and IE8 supported standards, the users would abandon IE8 because it 'breaks' pages, and MS don't want that."

Any more points you need repeating or do you understand how it works now?

Christopher

You change your ideas to suit the occasion, don't you.

I earlier pointed out that IE6 and earlier were broken and needed changing. You told us that this tag was only for IE7 rendering under IE8 and told us that the earlier IE versions weren't the issue.

Now you say they are.

You still have ignored the explanation of why an "IE7 not W3C compliant" tag, which is ignored by earlier versions of IE, so only for IE8 helps the adoption of standards. You still haven't shown why making w3C pages and getting IE8 to show them as W3C HTML isn't "advancing the standards" instead (thereby assuring that the REMOVAL of this non-standard tag is actually advancing standards).

Your retort of "The tag tells it not to break them" doesn't work, either. You've too many meta-syntatic variables. The tag doesn't tell IE8 to break the standards. If you mean that non-standard HTML pages won't be broken by IE8 if it's tagged as IE7 compliant (which doesn't say ANYTHING about earlier versions of IE, so where's that stuff about IE6/5.5/5/... come from?), then how about making the page ready for IE8, like you did for your pages that were IE5 and it was then discontinued and you had to move to IE6? You made your pages compliant with IE6 no problem. Then, when IE6 was replaced with IE7 because IE6 is broken and unsupported, you changed your IE6 pages to be IE7 pages. So change your IE7 pages to IE8. You've done it before. And the advantage you get this time (that you didn't get before when making it IEx specific) is that it is now compliant with other browsers. Like Firefox, Safari, KHTML and others. It should be MORE fine.

And please remember, your change from IE5 to IE6 didn't come with a meta-tag that said "This is borken IE5 HTML, so please render it with the bugs of IE5 that we had to work around. Ta". If the meta-tag wasn't needed then, why is it needed now?

So that IE7 pages can remain on your intranet and you can remain locked into Windows. I can't see your CIO or (more especially) your CFO wanting the expense of having no bargaining position with a vendor because your web developers are lazy.