holy cow… microsoft does the right thing
A big kudos to Microsoft for “doing the right thing” and backpedaling on their ill-conceived and short-sighted plan to introduce yet another markup switch to IE8 to enable the most standard-compliant behavior. With this decision, they are placing standards and interoperability above clueless “developers” who have abused those standards in the past.
It’s a simple and unfortunate fact that much of the web today is still written to IE6’s quirks rather than true web standards.
The “DOCTYPE switch“, which was designed to switch between quirks mode and standard-compliant mode, was then further abused by poorly written development tools and developers who simply copied and pasted markup to get their content to validate without truly understanding what that means.
So, faced with the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t choice of either breaking those sites further or moving the web forward in a standards compliant way, the IE team initially announced they were implementing a ridiculous idea for yet another switch to specify which versions of which browsers a website was written for.
Predictably, all other major browser makers did the right thing and announced that they would not implement this switch. Reaction to the new switch from the web community at large was also mostly negative. And today, Microsoft has listened to that feedback and retracted their position, stating that IE8 will provide the most standards-compliant rendering by default.
So again, thank you Microsoft for making this tough, but correct, decision. I consider this day to be a definitive and redeeming turning point from your past actions (or, more correctly, inaction) which, in my opinion, are singularly responsible for the sorry state of the web today.
