IE finally feeling some love?
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It's rather nice to see the IE team getting so many positive comments for once.
I've been enjoying this debate/issue. Microsoft have clearly painted themselves into a corner with this one, but it's a prime example of a really tough design decision. It's also a great reminder that everything has consequences, and that everything is complex the deeper into it you go.
So let's look a little closer at this. How would you fix this? Default to new, "super" standards mode, or require pages to opt in? It's perhaps not quite as simple as the comments make it seem.
The original solution, adding a meta tag to "lock" you to a particular rendering engine version was pragmatic at best, clearly clumsy, yet it did solve the problem. But at the cost of the web developers. They were now asking for standards mode twice and they really didn't like to be cleaning up Microsoft's mess. And they were rather vocal about it.
But if you just fix your standards mode, then sites expecting a poorly implemented standards mode wouldn't work, and you've just Broken the Web.
And I think this is were most people have missed the point.
While the comments correctly stated that this would be easy to fix, either by updating the site or adding the meta tag, most failed to see the bigger picture.
Like, who pays for the fix? And what if the site doesn't get fixed?
So now Microsoft has just cost a lot of companies a lot of money (and that's not including those dodgy intranet sites...). And if the company doesn't bother fixing it, the problem just gets pushed down to the user, who'll blame the browser, not the site. And that's assuming the site is owned by a company.
This is not a great position for Microsoft to be in.
And this is why I think Microsoft have been bending over backwards to maintain compatibility. And it's interesting that it's the web developers that were against the original idea, it's not the web developers who'll foot the bill, or get penalised, and now it's the web developers giving all the praise.
But that's not to say that I disagree with their latest decision.
They made an interesting post after the original meta tag solution describing the new User Agent string. Slightly hypocritically, the advice was to update your sites, in case the new UA version Broke the Web.
The big problem with Breaking the Web is one of scale. How many sites will break because the standards implementation is fixed? How badly will they be broken? Are the unmaintained sites that I'm so worried about relying on poorly implemented standards? If they're unmaintained, do they matter any more? Is it a huge problem that if they have layout issues? Is it enough for the top 200 sites to work with a decent standards mode?
Firefox, Opera and Safari can implement proper standards support without the world ending. I guess we'll survive.