Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

[Lazybones]

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

Did MS finally get the message about standards?

[Thorin]

Wonderful!  But...

Too bad IE6 will still probably be the most used browser and we developers will STILL have to cater to it.

And like many of the posters, I wonder how IE8 Standards Mode will be enabled.  Different DocType, maybe?  Or will it be something the user has to set?

[Lazybones]

Render mode is determined first by DocType even in current versions of IE.

[Mr. Analog]

Using DocType to determine renderer is very important to bring the intertubes out of the 90s. If the check fails then it falls back to the old crappy parser that can only understand 4.01 (hopefully ignoring the rest).

The web needs to evolve and if IE8 can help support that by adhering to standards then I applaud the IE team.

[Thorin]

While I certainly hope that they will use DocType to determine what rendering engine to use, I'm wondering what will happen to sites that have the wrong DocType specified and were then coded to look good in IE6.  The developer in me screams, "Tell 'em to fix their sites!", but I wonder if they would.  And I wonder just what websites out there are coded specifically to IE6...  Let's hope it's not one of the ones we use regularly, like, say, our banking sites.

[Mr. Analog]

Agreed. I think it would be helpful for browsers to alert users of rendering errors. Not really for the user but for the developer so that they can see a big, ugly rendering error message somewhere and deal with it.

Even in the industry you find from time to time find malformed tables (etc). There's no excuse for it anymore.

[Darren Dirt]

Render mode is determined first by DocType even in current versions of IE.

Using DocType to determine renderer is very important to bring the intertubes out of the 90s. If the check fails then it falls back to the old crappy parser that can only understand 4.01 (hopefully ignoring the rest).

The web needs to evolve and if IE8 can help support that by adhering to standards then I applaud the IE team.

AGREED. EXCEEDINGLY.

Cuz we just implemented a major redesign of our website, which now heavily (and happily) relies on some really sweet CSS -- however in I.E. (even version 7, let alone 6 or 5) it defaults to Quirks Mode and it is ughified right now on any of the content pages (i.e. other than the "link pages"), because ATM we can't insert the proper DOCTYPE into the Domino-generated pages (until we upgrade our web server from our current near-ancient version :sigh: Of course, it works FINE in Firefox since that browser seems to be more intelligent in rendering non-DOCTYPE-specified content...)

Gotta love the web-design-standards caused headaches this close to Xmas...