By now most web designers and developers should have heard the ruckus and furor caused by the article in issue 251 of “A List Apart.” After reading the source article, the accompanying article by Eric Meyer, the assorted comments on ALA, and various blog entries amongst the web – here are my thoughts.
I’m not against the meta tag “switch”. But I think Microsoft is doing itself and the web a disservice by implementing the process backwards in my mind. The browser should always attempt to display the best (and then degrade gracefully). As it is proposed now, you have to add the meta tag to get IE 8 to act as IE 8 and not IE 7. In my mind the tag should be the switch to get the latest IE to act like an earlier version.
Of course the primary reason MS has this whole mess (and why we web designers and developers hate IE6) is the fact that MS tried to make Internet Explorer more then a browser – they attempted to make it a “platform” running ActiveX applications along with a special (others would say bastardized) Javascript. Add a several year hiatus to IE’s development and you get this terrible mess of a browser with “applications” that rely on its “brokenness” to work correctly. And now they’re asking us to code a special “switch” to get their browser to render the standards correctly. (Oh and possibly maintain the historical look of your website – which defeats one of the cool aspects of the internet – that it’s always changing and evolving).
Sorry Microsoft. I strongly suggest that if you do decide to use the meta tag “switch” that you reverse the behavior. The meta tag “switch” should be used to turn “on” the IE bugginess, not turn it off. Finally, this approach probably won’t ever be adopted by other browser vendors which will mean that the meta tag “switch” will invariably become worthless except to poorly written web sites. Such sites would be much better off re-writing their code and applications to actual modern web standards. It would be much more cost-effective for everyone.
That’s my thoughts anyway.
Further Thoughts: If this meta tag is the only way MS can push IE 8 to full standards compliance and still keep customers happy in the near future, so be it. But at some point Microsoft will need to ditch it and tell those who haven’t recoded their sites to standards that they really should (which is funny and sad because MS built many of the tools that created such buggy code in many cases) and join the rest of the civilized browser world where coding is done to standards and if it looks funky in the browser the first suspect should be bad code, not a quirky, non-standard browser rendering engine. At the very least this should only be in place until IE 10. Which they better deliver within the next 2 years. Otherwise the critics of the meta tag will be considered correct in viewing this as a cynical ploy by Microsoft to try and control the web. All of which, if true or even thought to be true, may prove to be the downfall of Internet Explorer as web developers, their clients, and even the average person begins to understand just how poorly a citizen IE has been, and continues to be, on the web. P.S. – I still think the meta tag implementation is backwards.
Comments
4 responses to “Thoughts on “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8””
I hadn’t heard about this until now. I don’t know what I think about it yet. I’ve always felt that the DOCTYPE idea kind of sucked because it was so unlike anything else in the page. That being said, the information provided by the DOCTYPE is useful to have for rendering pages in sane ways. I’m not sure what impact adding this meta tag would have, but it seems that more hints from the developer can’t really hurt. They can always be ignored, right? To prevent browsers from becoming bloated crapware, in fact, it may be necessary to ignore it. Who really wants to ship Firefox 6 with 3 or 4 rendering engines? Or who wants to maintain the code if they try to integrate it into one engine?
The web evolves. So should the way crappy old pages look.
The meta tag in itself doesn’t hurt – it’s the fact that Doctype was supposed to be the solution to this originally but because of IE, it now won’t help MS as they try to 1) maintain backwards compliance for corporate clients and 2) move on to the future by adopting web standards. Too many people are using doctype inappropriately. The problem MS faces is that it has 2 very different audiences: One is business that have bought into the IE cluelessness and built sites to IE 6 compliance and the other is the rest of the world who use web standards and compliant browsers.The way MS has built IE and it’s HTML editing/creation tools has messed even the doctype solution. Thus the reason for the meta tag solution – the meta tag gives MS a solution to meet the needs of these two groups. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that other then the way MS thinks the default should work – IE 8 will default to IE 7 rendering unless the meta tag is present. That’s just “wrong” in my view.
I tend to be a little less charitable toward Microsoft.
When you are the big guy, and you make both the authoring tools that build the pages to be rendered and the viewing tool (IE), then the main thing you want is for all of YOUR stuff to look good when working together. Full compatibility with “web standards” means full compatibility with your competitor’s products, and then they might look as good as you do. So that is not high on the list of necessary things.
I’m reluctant to suggest that MS might actually have internal meetings to figure out the “best” incompatibilities to design into their products, but I would not be surprised if they do.
Microsoft’s priorities are:
[1] Serve Microsoft
[2] Don’t tick off your own customers unless necessary as a strategy to do item [1].
[3] Don’t tick off others who might become MS customers, unless necessary as a strategy to do item [1].
Microsoft has tried quite hard to take effective ownership of the Internet through the powerful effect of their 90% market share. That is why they worked so hard to kill Netscape, back in the days before they were found (by the court ruling) to be a monopoly. They have to be a bit more careful now, but the motivation remains the same.
It’s true MS has a poor history of playing well with others, but with the current legal, business, and social environment MS is having to either tread very carefully with its proprietary stuff or build in compatibility. A great example is that the Fed. Courts put MS on another 2 years of court oversight. It is noteworthy though that several commentators on this latest issue have brought up the “And what if Windows ASP servers render them faster and better?” It’s definitely out there but I’m going with the “trust but verify”. The other thing is is that no one has to put in the meta tag and many designers and developers are promising to do that which means that Microsoft might very well be killing off IE due to it’s non-compliance with the standards. The only way for this to work out sort-of okay for MS is to 1) reverse the function of the meta tag so that IE8’s default behavior is standards based (the tag tells it to not render in standards) and 2) as quickly as possible get everyone off the meta-tag. Otherwise this might become the reality: Has Internet Explorer Just Shot Itself in the Foot?