Microsoft Backs Down: Internet Explorer 8 Will Embrace Web Standards After All
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has backed down and announced that the upcoming IE8 will support established web standards out of the box. The news reverses Microsoft’s earlier decision that, while IE would bring improved support for web standards, those features would be disabled by default.
Although Microsoft’s IE Blog claims that the change is part of the company’s newfound support for "Interoperability Principles," there’s an equally good chance that the widespread criticism from the design community — condemning IE 8 for not defaulting to standards mode — coupled with lawsuits from the likes of Opera and the EU, played a large part in the decision.
Although Microsoft first claimed that it wanted to preserve backward compatibility for websites optimized to work with earlier versions of IE, it has since reversed that decision and will embrace web standards as the default rendering option in IE8.
IE8 will still feature three rendering modes, a "super standards" mode, where pages are rendered according to web standards, an IE7 standards mode, which mimics the incomplete support in IE7, and what Microsoft charitably calls IE6’s "standards mode."
The key change is that by default IE8 will render pages using the "super standards" mode, which means that if you’ve been creating webpages based on the W3C’s established guidelines, IE8 should handle your site without issue (assuming IE8’s standards support is as good as the IE8 team is promising).
And that could eliminate one of the biggest headaches in web design — making a separate stylesheet to cope with IE and all its lovable quirks.
If you’ve been designing web pages specifically for IE6 or 7, fear not, you can use previously discussed meta tag to tell IE8 that your code isn’t up to snuff and IE8 should fall back on its older understanding of HTML.
This announcement is quite possibly the most exciting news designers have had in years, and while it’s true that it will still be quite some time before IE8 arrives and even longer before the last traces of IE6 fade away, at least you can rest easy dreaming of a future where the brand of browser is irrelevant to design of your website.
Of course the CSS 3 spec and HTML 5 will eventually appear and support will vary at first - at least one browser will be slow in adding support for them - but it sounds so good doesn’t it, one stylesheet that works with every browser?
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