Microsoft makes themselves look stupid to web developers again.
Stupid Microsoft has yet again shitted the web dev community off with recent announcements about how IE8 will pass the Acid 2 test. Not that that’s the bad thing. The Acid 2 test is like the grand-daddy of browser rendering tests, something that Microsoft has completely ignored despite continual and unabated pleading from the web dev community. This announcement is like the light at the end of the tunnel for web developers. What it means is that after all this time, web developers eventually will no longer have to write a bunch of IE specific, standards breaking hacks for Internet Explorer. They can maintain standards compliant code, as well as get their layouts to work correctly in IE. OMFG!
That announcement alone is life changing enough – there is a whole continent in my own mental landscape devoted to hating on IE. I find it hard to envisage the land being devoid of inhabitants, and I wonder what I am going to do with all those extra mental processes. I think there would have been a bunch of web developers that would have been languishing in the after-glow of the announcement thinking, ‘Thank goodness, soon I can start doing what I have always wanted – designing the way I have always wanted.’
I couldn’t help but think (because my brain is ‘cognitively locked in’ to thinking of MS and IE in this way) that it would seem that the IE team somehow managed to pull a swifty on MS executive management. As we all know, Microsoft are fundamentally opposed to interoperability. If they had gone interoperable 10 years ago, they probably wouldn’t exist today (or so the executive team at MS thinks). Instinctively I felt that despite this incredibly good news about MS’s next browser passing the Acid 2 test, MS will get in there and make sure that they maintain the status quo and somehow continue to fuck things up for web developers, and stab the internet right in the back.
Drum-roll please… “IE8 to have three rendering modes”
1) “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
2) “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
3) If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element.
Wha? ‘Quirks mode’, ‘Standards Mode’ and then ‘*Real* Standards Mode’ (but only if you bung in an IE specific meta tag). And so there we have it, in order for IE8 to render strictly to standards, we as web developers must insert a non-standard tag at the beginning of the page – which of course completely falsifies their claims of IE8 passing the Acid 2 test.