Microsoft Pushes Devs With Wider IE8 Beta

An anonymous reader recommends a story about the upcoming beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. InternetNews expects that the standards-compliant default mode will push many developers to update their sites. We've previously discussed IE8's standards compliance and other features. Quoting: "Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE -- most recently, the current commercial release, IE7. Now those pages will need to be changed. Microsoft originally planned for IE8 to default to rendering similarly to IE7, while super standards mode would have been an option. The outcry from critics helped convince Microsoft officials to instead default to super standards. That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Anonymous Coward]

Before anyone starts bitching about how much IE sucks and how it's lack of standards is nothing but a burden on anyone, understand that this is a decent move by Microsoft in the right direction.
I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered.

"it's better than nothing"

[TW Atwater]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Kjella]

That pretty well sums up the entire Microsoft experience.

For those trying to mix Microsoft and non-Microsoft software, or that haven't paid the latest upgrade fees. Once you go a little past e-mail and word and into corporate software though like Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM, I'd say it's the norm rather than the exception. Try going with IBM or CA or SAP or IFS and you'll find they all tend to work much better with their own products than trying to piece together a best of breed. Make no mistake, Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive. The other option is to find alternative software for all of it, they rise and fall together. Some are quite good and the rest dragged along, so despite the best efforts by many there hasn't been that much falling...

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[try_anything]

Microsoft is out to make you an all Microsoft shop which can be fairly pleasant but expensive.

Microsoft has educated an entire generation of developers and consultants who do nothing but push Microsoft technologies in mixed shops, where they are unwanted, technically and socially isolated, and not very useful.

But once you've installed an expensive Microsoft product that is a failure because most people hate it and only a few people use it, there's a cure: just replace a little bit more of your working infrastructure with Microsoft products, and suddenly the unused Microsoft products will become vital, useful parts of your business instead of embarrassing mistakes.

So the whole project tanked in the end? Well, you can't blame the Microsoft technologies. They're all "Best of Breed" products with all the right buzzwords and bullet points. Just think of how efficient and unstoppable you would be if you had just managed to convince your employees to use it. I guess you weren't ready to be a Best of Breed business.

This is the eternally recurring story of Microsoft developers, consultants, and "process experts" who just push Microsoft instead of actually doing their jobs.

Doing their jobs, by the way, means studying the businesses they work for, finding out what features would be beneficial and which would actually be used, and figuring out how the available technologies will fit into current practices and current infrastructure. Oh, and figuring out how software can help you simplify process. More often than not, behemoth kitchen sink software does not allow you to create a customized, lightweight process for a unique business.

Most Microsoft consultants who read that last sentence will say, "Ah, here's where it becomes obvious that this guy is on drugs/inexperienced/trolling." Because their Microsoft marketing brochures -- sorry, "educational publications for developers" -- tell them that the only way to create a customized, lightweight solution is to buy the BIGGEST and most featureful product available. You wouldn't want to adopt (or, gasp, develop!) a product and find out it's missing that one vital feature that's necessary to make it lightweight.

So, instead of doing their job, they compare products on a bullet-point basis, using Microsoft "educational" materials to guide them, and work towards a vision of the future in which the more processes and supporting software features people use, the more efficient they are. It's no accident that project plans for adopting Microsoft technologies usually involve adopting tons of practices and processes at the same time -- it helps justify the expense and complexity of the software, and it helps construct a utopian fantasy in which the business will run in perfect synchrony because of the awesome power of process, in defiance of human nature and in defiance of the finite number of hours in the day.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[try_anything]

There are plenty of other consulting religions that are able to spin such an idealistic view of what other businesses are achieving that the customer is too ashamed to say, "Hey, none of this works for me. You were supposed to build something that works for my business and my employees, not something that works for the idealized business you want us to be."

However, there aren't many other consulting religions in which most of the consultants themselves are devout believers who retain their faith no matter what kind of destruction they cause. Even Rails and J2EE developers eventually come to realize that those technologies only are good in certain contexts. Microsoft guys just blame the customer for not reaching far enough for the helping hand Microsoft offered them.

Re:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Oh, I'm quite sure some Microsoft software is actually worse than nothing. Much of the on-line help in recent versions of some products is just an annoying distraction when you accidentally hit F1 and it takes several seconds to appear, for example, and it's usually faster to use a search engine to find useful answers on the web anyway if you actually wanted some help.

But most of the time, I agree: Microsoft's software is useful, and substantially better than nothing.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Just design for actual standards and leave idiot IE users high and dry..

From the actual transcript from Brian's Performance Review:

Boss: Well Brian, I see that since you took over the web site that complaints about our website have gone up 80 fold and we've lost more than half our customers. What do you make of this?
Brian: They're all idiots.

Re:"it's better than nothing"

[memojuez]

You're absolutely right. American Businesses are more worried about reaching the most people, if non IE users, like myself, can't render their page correctly, I am insignificant consequence to mass marketing to them.

It's a shame that it took a European company like Opera Software to force European Regulators [internetnews.com] to stop the Microsoft's take over of the Web.

Sometimes, there's these crazy

[deesine]

people, we call them bosses, and they make these crazy demands like, I don't care why, I just want it to work!".

Oh, I forgot to mention, these bosses sign our paychecks.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jeiler]

Agreed. I will admit that I have remarkably little sympathy for those who have to reconfig their sites to standards, I have to admit that's the wrong attitude on my part. Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

Re:

[maxume]

As a user, I often care whether a site is easy to navigate and has a decent structure.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Red Flayer]

Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard," even if it was designed for optimum functionality and safety: all they care about is "Does it look good."

I'm unsure of who you mean by "users" -- do you mean web developers, or end-viewers?

If you mean developers, then adhering to standards and "looking good" are the same thing -- since more and more end-viewers use browsers other than IE. Developers should care about adhering to standards because not doing so may alienate some of their (or their employers') potential customers.

If you meant end-viewer, they aren't really germane to the discussion, since what we're discussing is in the blackbox to them. All they will understand is that some sites seem "broken"... not understanding that it's because they are using a non-compliant browser. Again this goes back to the developers, since it is their duty to make sure their website looks good (or even is viewable) by the most number of people.

Please note I'm generalizing here, I'm sure there are exceptions.

Re:

[jeiler]

If you meant end-viewer, they aren't really germane to the discussion, since what we're discussing is in the blackbox to them.

It's only "blackbox" if the results cannot be differentiated from another browser/platform. The very fact that a page looks different on some browsers than on others violates the blackbox concept.

Again this goes back to the developers, since it is their duty to make sure their website looks good (or even is viewable) by the most number of people.

"The most of the people" is people

Re:

[Nicolay77]

Most users don't care about some arbitrary "standard,"

Users of other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari care if a website doesn't work in their browsers. Making a website conforming to standards will probably make those sites work equally well in all those browsers.

And I believe those alternative browsers have about 30%-40% of total users now, and growing.

And Firefox adoption alone will force those webmasters to use standards, now that Firefox 3 is finally a fine browser (and the other browsers are making nice progress too, but firefox leads in users) it

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Unforunately, it's not that simple. Previous versions of IE were broken enough that standards-compliant HTML and CSS would not render properly. So if you wanted the majority of people to be able to actually use your site, you /had/ to be aware of - and often code around - IE stupidity, for all but the simplest of applications.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[wvmarle]

So true.
Call me a loser, but after setting up my website nicely with CSS defined columns, floats, etc - it didn't work in IE. It just displayed an empty page! While it worked fine in Mozilla, FF and Safari.
I recoded the site using tables for lay-out.
When I did that, it worked nicely in IE as well. And I really had the intention to move with the times.
It's a simple company site, partly static, partly dynamic - but using tables was the easiest way out for me, without having to learn even more new things. I've got better things to do with my time.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[jmusits]

Browser specific stylesheets.

If people were using these instead of horrible CSS hacks to make their pages work within IE then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately too many people are still using CSS hacks to make their pages render properly.

By using browser specific stylesheets, assuming that IE8 is actually standards compliant like FF, then IE6 and IE7 can continue to load their stylesheets to fix their problems and IE8 will only load the non-specific stylesheet as FF does and then all will be good.

Since you place the browser specific stylesheet after the generic one the styles in defined in the browser specific stylesheets override the ones in the generic stylesheet, while the ones only defined in the generic one cascade down. This is the beauty of Cascading Style Sheets.

Re:

[jeiler]

No way in hell I'm going to call you a loser--you were writing to the market.

Re:

[jonaskoelker]

Here's an idea:

Write a standards-adherent CSS, and check that it works in firefox, konqueror, safari, elinks and $BROWSER. Then, write a completely different CSS stylesheet for IE. Make apache return one or the other, depending on the user-agent string. Any reasons why this would be infeasible?

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[ptlis]

The user-agent string is not a reliable indicator of which user-agent is being used (as counter-intuitive as this seems), a much better methodology (that several other people have already mentioned) is to use IE conditional comments to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of Internet Explorer after the main stylesheet to override only the specific rules required to get that version of internet explorer to display the content as expected.

This has several advantages:

• the ability to have different rules to handle bugs in specific versions of IE.
• if future versions are released then they'll ignore the stylesheets targeted at older versions (so if IE8 is as good as it's been made out to be your documents should render correctly without any additional work)...
• and if there are still some some small bugs then IE8 can itself get a stylesheet designed to fix just these.
• unlike methods that rely on the UA string, it is guaranteed only to be applied by the browser you specify (because browsers other than IE see the conditional comments as just plain old HTML comments (relying on the UA string would mean that UAs pretending to be IE would not be incorrectly served the IE hack filled stylesheet)

This is the methodology I prefer to follow with the sites that I develop, and after the experiences I had testing compatibility and fixing various layout problems that remained in IE7 I can say that it definitely pays off. Personally I'm hoping that IE8 will be close enough that I can finally dump IE conditional comments entirely once the older versions have disappeared and relegate it to the pile of no-longer relevant skills alongside the ability to generate pixel perfect layouts using tables & invisible spacer gifs and the ability to consistently beat almost anyone at Perfect Dark multiplayer.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[zlogic]

Actually, pre-IE7 versions had a broken HTTP implementation. Not only do they fail to render pages properly, but they can't even ask the server nicely to get them :-) Apache even has a special mode in its HTTP Digest authentication module that enters an IE-quirks mode (tm) when the browser-agent is IE6 or less.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

Uh. min-width is in IE7. I'm surprised you don't know that if you're testing "primary in Internet Explorer".

Not to be high and mighty, but you really really really should develop against a standards-compliant browser *first*, which means any one of Konqueror, Safari, Opera, or Firefox, and then hack IE once you're all done using conditional comments. Since all the browser vendors other than Microsoft do a good job of adhering to standards at this point, by testing against one of those browsers you can pretty well guarantee you will be functioning in the rest of them. It makes much more sense than to test on the outlier (IE) and then try to fiddle with it until it works in everything else.

I'm quite confident that none of my sites will need to be updated for IE8 as long as Microsoft are doing their jobs, because the sites are written to conform to standards and only use conditional comments with special CSS for browsers <= IE7. That means that when IE8 rolls around, it will get served the same standards-compliant code as everything else and (for once) will not break on it.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[Snover]

I strongly disagree. Unless you want to end up having to do like this article suggests and make a bunch of changes every time a new browser comes out (and maybe you do -- I bet it's good for business), it makes much more sense to test against something that you know adheres to defined standards and then doing minor fixups for IE at the end.

If you're writing and testing against IE, and you write a line of CSS that doesn't do what you expect and change it to make it work, but the reason it wasn't working isn't because you wrote it wrong but because IE calculates some dimensions incorrectly (read: hasLayout), then when you get around to testing it in everything else (and by "everything else" I mean "Firefox", since this is what the IE-first crowd seems to think means "everything else") it's broken. Now compound this issue 20 times, because there are 20 distinct things in the CSS that cause IE to fuck up. Maybe there are also some combinations of things that trigger a bug. So now, instead of writing hacks to work around IE's brokenness, you are writing hacks and sending different code conditionally to "work around" the browsers that are rendering it properly. Suddenly, when IE8 comes around and fixes the bugs you're relying on in IE, you've got a broken Web site again. It's just a bad idea, and getting things working across all the other browsers, frankly, takes a mere fraction of the time it does to get things touched up properly for IE.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[capnkr]

Based on what I've seen in my logs the past few years, the 90% figure for IE share in browsers is no longer accurate at all, and in fact hasn't been for some time. Firefox broke those numbers a couple years ago, and continues to gain share. Currently I'd put Firefox use at about 30-35% of what I'm seeing being used by "regular folks", or non-techs.

Because I felt that it was the Right Thing to do, I've always coded for standards compliant browsers first, and hacked it to work for IE later. So with this announcement by MS, it's interesting and ironically funny to me that it a move by MS (albeit after many years of loud public complaining by web devs) is going to for once make me work *less* than those who code for IE only. :)

I never thought I'd say this (and reserve the right to take back this statement until I've seen that IE8 *really* does have compliance to W3 standards when it's released), but, well, here it is: Good job, MS IE Team!

Re:

[Vectronic]

"...I won't be caught dead while browsing your site."

Obviously not, you could be caught alive browsing their site though, or found dead infront of a computer displaying the site.

demo of how MS sets a standard ..

[rs232]

"at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered"

Well , they could have bothered while they were about cloning Netscape [edge-op.org] and making running any other browser a jolting experience [edge-op.org] and preventing Netscale from sabotaging their protocol extensions [edge-op.org]. Or in english, making web pages not render correctly in other peoples browsers .. :)

Re:

[Jugalator]

I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late

IMO, it's maybe "too little" given that they still won't support Acid 3 in the final IE 8 release, but I wouldn't call it too late. It's never too late to me to improve standards support like this. It's very late though, yes, definitely.

Re:Cue the "M$" bashing shrills

[cp.tar]

Yes, it is a very good move.

The question is, how much good will it do them?

My estimate is that the mere fact that they were willing to change their usual policy to that extent shows how much weaker their market position has become.
Most new sites, as far as I've noticed, are coded to standards. Most of the others are no longer "Best viewed under IE 6.0" either. Firefox holds about 25% of the global browser marketshare, and over 40% in certain European countries.
Microsoft did not switch to standards because of the goodness of their software-making hearts. They did it because there is no longer any other game in town.

Of course, that does not mean they will not try to subvert standards at some later date, when they have stopped bleeding users and maybe even regained some markertshare. But for now, standards are of utmost importance -- without them, they know they will continue bleeding users to other browsers.

It has to mean something when you have the OS monopoly, when you've used it to gain browser monopoly, and now you're still losing.
I welcome Microsoft's new strategy because it will not help only Microsoft, but also all the others. Unless, of course, people fail to update their sites and Microsoft remains the only browser capable of rendering them. But they are in a minority.

Re:

[BasharTeg]

First of all, most statistics I've seen for Firefox browser usage are about as over-inflated as some peoples' Mac statistics or Linux-desktop statistics. Most Firefox fans like to pull their statistics from w3c or other standards sites, or from Slashdot and other pro-OSS or related sites. Obviously these numbers are ridiculously skewed because the people visiting these sites are going to be more aware of standards issues. If you look at stats from marketing and advertising sources, which tend to have a w

Re:

[walshy007]

Funnyily enough I agree with all of your post except the ***

For starters "DEP" known to the rest of the world as the NX bit, has been supported in linux kernels since 2004, now this should not require any code changes at all to utilize. The kernel handles memory protection, and when the binary is loaded I'd imagine everything in .data and .bss should be protected, aswell as every malloc.

now, on to ASLR, since linux 2.6.12 it's on by default, and also, requires no special code, it just works, as it shoul

Re:

[milsoRgen]

I had IE8 in use for some time. I installed it for no particular reason and didn't really notice any particular difference (not that I was truly looking for any truth be told, it was just shiny and new). It ran reasonably fast, memory consumption wasn't wildly different from previous incarnations, pages displayed roughly the same as with any modern browser. No crashes... So yeah, not much to talk about from an end use experience. Although it should be noted FF is my primary browser so my actual use was limi

Re:

[hackstraw]

I know, I know, it's almost too little, too late, but it's better than nothing and as long as this trend continues, at least we might have a decent amount of cross-browser standards in a few years time, as opposed to none if Microsoft simply hadn't bothered.

Kinda like the guy coming to his senses and complying now that a gun is at his head.

Face it, as much as MS has tried to "own" the web, open standards and competition (mostly from open source projects), has figuratively put the gun to their head.

I sure do

Re:

[Urthwhyte]

Funny, I've never had anything remotely similar happen in over 13 years of using Windows, I believe that the PEBKAC virus may have been the root cause of the error.

Re:

[Nicolay77]

This seems to be a Layer 8 [wikipedia.org] kind of error.

I'm not sure if a more complex OS is the answer here.

Let's Bash Microsoft!

[h4rm0ny]

So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"

*sigh

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Macthorpe]

I would have summarised like this:

- IE7 not standards compliant
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant but not by default
- Slashdot posts article complaining
- IE8 standards compliant by default
- Slashdot... posts article complaining

I can only echo your sighing...

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[FooAtWFU]

That's only because Slashdot has both Complainers and Non-Complainers on any given topic, and the Complainers are the ones who enjoy posting most. So they do.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only echo your sighing...

Get a room guys!

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[cyfer2000]

1. X1.0 (X=mozilla, firefox, opera, office, openoffice.org, macbook, macbook air, X300...) is not whatever.
2. Slashdot posts article complaining
3. X1.5 is better
4. Slashdot posts article complaining
5. X2.0 is even better
6. Slashdot... posts article complaining

You must be new here.

Re:

[ConceptJunkie]

Well the complaining comes from people who code for IE, who always pay the price for every stupid thing Microsoft has ever done. Maybe MS is doing the right thing finally, but customers will once again have to pay the price to correct all the bad things they did to get it to work with the broken prior versions of IE. Incompetence is not the biggest problem with Microsoft. Their utter contempt for customers is.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[dal20402]

retards that still use IE6

Not everyone who uses IE6 does so by choice. The admins at my last workplace refuse to upgrade, install an alternate browser, or allow users to install an alternate browser.

From a user perspective, the best thing about Microsoft's decision in IE8 is that it will force IT admins to phase out IE6 as sites increasingly stop working with IE6.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[Metasquares]

Not to mention that the mere release of IE8 should be enough to attenuate IE6 support, since many web developers code for the latest n browser versions. For me, n=2, and I for one look forward to abandoning IE6 when IE8 is released.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

I think the complaint isn't so much that they're implementing a proper standards mode, more the fact that it has taken so long for them to do this.

People kept getting peeved off expecting Microsoft to start implementing some proper standard support (something which was expected of them in IE7) and then getting annoyed when they do a half hearted attempt at it.

Re:

[poetmatt]

I agree.

Especially since people were kicking and screaming over the fact that Microtard needed to be standards compliant from when IE8 dev began...I remember the posts where people were like "you need to be standards compliant" and MS was like "well, you have the option, thats good enough".

Something is way wrong (which is obvious with MS) if it takes a huge company months to decide to listen to their customers/employees/etc.

Re:

[bunratty]

IE 8 is still not going to support standards well. It will simply do as well as it can by default. Previously, IE 8 would render pages as badly as IE 7 by default. Now it will render them as well as IE 8 can by default. IE 8 is still going to be far behind Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5 in standards support.

Re:

[Tacvek]

That is true, but many of the more nasty CSS bugs, which are a source of many (but definitely not all) of the IE specific workarounds should probably be fixed, since apparently IE 8 does pass Acid 2.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[pete-classic]

I'm not defending the summary, but it is worth remembering that Microsoft actively undermined web standards for the last decade or so. It is laudable that they are finally getting on board with the program, but the reason these sites need to be re-worked is that Microsoft intentionally archived and maintained browser dominance with their own "take" on how web standards should work.

I don't see any reason they shouldn't shoulder the blame for the cleanup costs.

-Peter

Re:

[h4rm0ny]

And similarly I'm not forgetting what Microsoft have done, I'm just condemning the summary. ;)

Re:

[Znork]

The summary is much improved if you shorten it a bit:

"Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE" ... "That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

*shrug* I guess the whole 'standards' thing is something every generation has to learn on its own. Those of us who've been in the industry for 20 years know that proprietary means you do it again, and again, and again...

Re:

[Blakey Rat]

This is all idiocy anyway.

IE has now fallen under the same spell that the rest of the web standards community has fallen under, namely, the illusion that old web sites will be upgraded for newer browser. Here's a hint, W3C, Mozilla, and now Microsoft: They won't.

Large commercial websites (for example, this one: http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx [jcpenney.com] ) are coded using the 1998 method of lots of tables and hardly any CSS. And that's a page that's:
1) Been updated every single day for the last 5 years at leas

Re:

[spitzak]

That is a quote from the article, not a Slashdot addition.

And I certainly did not read it as "bash Microsoft". I read it as "bash those people who forced Microsoft to default to standards because they made all you web developers have to do more work".

Microsoft is clearly, finally, doing the right thing. And I think that sentence is from somebody mad that their beloved Microsoft is being forced to do the right thing and is making up reasons why this is bad.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[bunratty]

Why doesn't half the web break with all the other browsers when they are updated? I don't remember Firefox users complaining that Firefox 2 broke half the web. I don't remember Safari users complaining that Safari 3 broke half the web. I don't remember Opera users complaining that Opera 9 broke half the web. Why would IE users complain that IE 8 breaks half the web? You don't mean Microsoft has been doing something wrong for the past several years to bring this about, do you?

Re:

[bigstrat2003]

And? What's your point? So, Microsoft should've been doing better in the past. That is entirely immaterial now. What matters is, moving forward while breaking as little as possible... which is NOT what Microsoft is doing.

Re:

[bunratty]

Other browsers weren't doing as well in the past, either. Yet somehow they've managed to keep up to the new standards. Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards? Why not stop making excuses and finally just support the standards as well as the other browsers already? If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup. They shouldn't force us to live year after year with the mistakes of the past. Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it? My point is

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[SirLurksAlot]

Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards?

Because it's not that simple. You have to remember, they have a whole business model built around keeping a large customer base which they've been building for almost 20 years happy. There are companies out there that have built their entire infrastructure on MS products, namely IE, and for MS to "simply support the new standards" means breaking (lots) of old functionality. That translates into actual dollar amounts when it comes time to fix all the old web applications out there that rely on the borked functionality that $_IE_VERSION <= 7 provided. In other words, this is going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money. To make it even worse for MS once IE supports the standards it means that lots of corporate sites will render correctly in a variety of browsers, giving people even less reason to use IE. This is a lose/lose situation for MS.

Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it?

The response you've given makes perfect sense from a consumer point of view. "WTF mate, how hard can it be!?" exclaims the user who doesn't have to pay for or worry about implementing the changes. Now, having said that I have zero pity for all those businesses who were duped into vendor lock-in and are going to be in a world of pain if they don't get their sites up to spec, and I have zero pity for MS. They have well and truly made their own bed and they can certainly sleep in it.

If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup.

They are. That's why IE is going to support the standards by default. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, although I suspect a good many people want a blood sacrifice and sworn oaths to never put web developers in this position again.

My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.

Oh come on, of course we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them ;-)

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[thue]

The web developers will have 6 months to insert

<eta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

on their pages. Nothing else is needed to ensure their pages will continue working in the new IE. If they can't be bothered to do that then I don't care if their pages break...

Re:

[Hal_Porter]

Read this

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html [joelonsoftware.com]
The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You'd think they're the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn't, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff. "YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don't care if 80% of your websites stop working. I'll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And

qwerks mode anyone?

[pizzach]

No it isn't. This is going to make half the Web break in IE8. The smart thing to do was what they did originally: default to legacy IE mode, and allow site developers to put a meta tag in to force standards mode. Then, some number of years down the road, when the majority of people were running sites that were standards-compliant (with or without the special meta tag), IE could've defaulted to standards mode. It's called phasing out old stuff, which is something you have to do when the old behavior is so widespread.

What are you talking about?

• Half of the web doesn't even specify a doctype. Those pages would be rendered in qwerks mode anyway, meaning they would display fine.
• The zealots that are using strict html4 are most likely already aware of any display problems already.
• The xhtml using folks basically already said "Screw Microsoft! I don't care if you can view this page anyway!" to begin with.

Damn drama queen.

Re:Let's Bash Microsoft!

[jalefkowit]

If moving to IE8 is going to "break" your site, it's already "broken" for anybody who views it in any browser other than IE. That's about 20% of the browsing population (and more every day).

If I was a corporation and my web development team had been shipping a site that flat didn't work for 1/5 of my customers, I'd have fired them long before this.

Re:

[bigstrat2003]

It's not true standards compliance, but it's what we call an "intermediary step". The idea is that the meta tag gets put in sites which are in active development, where one tag isn't going to make any difference in the workload anyway. Sites which are already broken will stay broken, sites which are already working will stay working, but it improves the situation for NEW sites, without any real amount of work.

Lazy dumbasses

[Daimanta]

"that, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

Well, if you don't code to standards, that's what you get. I don't feel sorry for them.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[pezpunk]

just to play devil's advocate here, you're suggesting a designer should code to standards, and let the page be broken for 80% of his visitors? i don't think many designers would keep that job very long.

Re:

[dmsuperman]

I have to agree with you there. I code my site to look good in a normal browser (like firefox), then go back in with either CSS or Server Side HTML Change hacks, to make it render properly in IE 6+. Since I've coded this way, all I'll have to do is tell everything that IE8 users will see the same page as Firefox users, meaning I won't have to do anything more than add another case in my switch/case determining which hacks should be included into the page from my PHP. I just wish more developers should rea

Re:

[bigman2003]

Your plan is fairly good, but not perfect.

What if you died tomorrow...who would add the extra code to make this work?

A better method would be to deliver the standards version by default, unless you made specific conditions. So you could have an IE 5 version, IE 6 version, IE 7 version, etc.

Then, when IE 8 came out, you could do nothing...and it would deliver the 'proper' version.

Re:

[LordKazan]

i've coded to standards for eons and my pages have never been broken for IE users

Re:

[wvmarle]

You're so lucky, or using ancient html only. See my comment before: I coded to standards, CSS and all, W3C said it's all correct, and IE: displays an empty page. Not even broken. Switching back to a tables based layout made the page work in IE as well.

Re:Lazy dumbasses

[J0nne]

No, it's a skill. Most of IE's bugs are well-documented with workarounds and everything. It's really possible to write css-based layouts and have them work in IE, we do it all the time.

Re:

[Nicolay77]

This is a case where the only thing I can say to both you and the GP is:

Show us the code.

Re:

[Nicolay77]

See this [slashdot.org].

Re:

[hacker]

Whether you want to admit it or not, IE defined the de facto majority standard of the web. The "real" standard was in competition and didn't gain any traction for quite a few years.

You spelled "usage" wrong there.

Standards are defined by standards bodies, like the W3C in the case of web standards. Microsoft's ignorance of those ratified and accepted standards for several years does not change the fact that standards existed before they decided to ignore them and try to create their own.

Microsoft by no

Re:

[BotnetZombie]

Yep. Dance with the devil and you burn, even if it's warm at first. Film at 11.
Only sad thing is that it wont be the long gone pointy-haired bosses that get bitten, but instead the poor on-the-floor webdevs.

I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[apathy maybe]

When I develop pages, I like to do so in XHTML, simply because it is nicer to develop in for me (someone who initially learnt nasty 3.whatever back in 2000).

So, because I use PHP, I go and tell everyone that the page I'm serving up is application/xhtml+xml. Whoops, MSIE doesn't understand that... *roles eyes*. So I have to chuck in a bit of code to check for MSIE, and then add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."

Not to mention having to chuck in IE specific CSS (the /only/ thing I like about IE is the fact that it has that comment stuff
which allows a separate style sheet that no other browser sees).

Meh, I'll continue not developing for MSIE, unless I have to, and because I'm using standards compliant code, the site should still be perfectly viewable, even without CSS. If only other people decided not to develop for MSIE, maybe more people would get a better browser...

Actually maybe MSIE 8 will actually mean that I don't have to care that IE even exists? (Sorta how I don't care that Opera exists, because I know that it is relatively standards compliant.)

Re:I'll be happy with proper XHTML support.

[FishWithAHammer]

add a disclaimer at the bottom, "If your user agent has MSIE in it, then this page was served as text/html. Maybe you should stop using MSIE if you are, or change your user agent if you aren't."

Or...you can make it work for them and stop bitching.

Nobody really cares what work you have to do in order to make a site work for them. Your whining doesn't serve the purpose you want it to.

Sad, but true.

Re:

[l0b0]

XHTML in IE, using PHP? Here are the two things you need:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) and stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml')) {
define('MIME_TYPE', 'application/xhtml+xml');
} else {
define('MIME_TYPE', 'text/html');
}

and an XHTML-to-HTML XSLT file [aspaass.no].

Unfortunately???

[VMaN]

This is anything BUT unfortunate.. Once agreed upon standards are the norm everyone will benefit, and it'll save a ton of work in the long run.

yay for MS on this call

Not that bad

[PhrostyMcByte]

If you write your site for Firefox, chances are you can just tell it to use that code for IE8. Assuming, of course, that IE8 comes through with their promises of compliance.

A little pain now for a lot less cumulative pain later. I'll take that!

Standards and deployment

[Midnight Thunder]

I am working for a large Canadian company and we are still using IE6. For whatever reason they are holding off on general deployment of IE7. Some of our imports customers also still have IE6 as the target platform. Given this, once IE8 is deployed I can still imagine another year before everyone is using it.

As to standards compliance, I will be interested to see where they are with CSS2, CSS3 and SVG support.

Pity the poor administrators

[sfritsche]

"That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

The only "unfortunate" thing about the need to retool web sites is that it could have been avoided by coding to the standards in the first place.

Idiots

[ScepticOne]

"I used non-standard code on my site and it stopped working. It must be someone else's fault!"

Morons.

IE standards compliant that is ..

[rs232]

That is of course standards-compliant to the current version of Internet Explorer and not a Browser by any other name .. :)

"Microsoft is .. letting Web site developers signal to IE [internetnews.com] how standards-compliant it ought to be with their pages"

How about writing web pages to a generic standard, something like W3C [w3.org]

re

[rs232]

go away astroturfer ..

hogwash, this is not a lot of work

[circletimessquare]

if you have the page render in firefox as appearance a

and you have the page render in ie as appearance b

then its a rather simple top level switch to say "all ie8 requests get rendered as appearance a"

you're not talking about a lot of work here folks

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

Why is Firefox assumed to be the reference implementation which must be matched?

Re:

[jimicus]

Why is Firefox assumed to be the reference implementation which must be matched?

Same reason as IE was considered the reference implementation that must be matched 7 years ago.

Re:

[Richard_at_work]

Because Firefox deviates badly from the W3C specification?

Re:

[jimicus]

Because Firefox deviates badly from the W3C specification?

Not quite what I meant.

Despite the original point of HTML being "content is important, layout is decided by the user (or, more accurately, their software)", it's not really worked out that way - hence why CSS came to be.

7 years ago, IE was the reference implementation not because it was any good but because it was what most people were likely to be using. So web designers could very well find themselves designing for IE (because that's what most of the customers would be using) then tweaking to make it lo

Do they plan to fix the select bug

[DarkOx]

The most irritating thing with IE for me these days is the select or "dropbox" bug. Watch give IE a select with not options and it will crash hard, just closes out on the user. This means that when your developing a dynamic form and there is any possibility of no selctions you have to write code for to custom handle the endcase. Which means you also have to consider they layout and appearace of your form when that control is absent, or do something tacky like make "nothing" an option.

On the back side its

Re:

[gazbo]

WTF? It certainly doesn't do that on my IE 7 installation. Also, your "custom code" complaint doesn't hold much water as the W3C specs state that a select element must contain at least one option element.

Re:

[nuzak]

I don't think crashing is exactly acceptable behavior when a standard isn't met.

I've never seen actual crashes like the GP mentioned, but IE7 would have fixed the bug he mentioned. IE actually uses its own widget set, the same as Firefox does, but until IE7, combo boxes were the exception: it actually took a different rendering path to render the win32 native peers they were implemented with. This is what made them slow and have problems with z-order, and why they tended to stick around longer when the pa

Re:

[J0nne]

Still, I don't get why the OP bitches about it crashing on empty select boxes. If your select box is going to be empty, don't display it. How hard is that to do?

Sure, IE shouldn't crash when it encounters one of those, but what's an user supposed to do with an empty select box?

Re:

[IBBoard]

Surely giving users a select box with no options is a bad idea anyway, since it will confuse them as to "what am I supposed to select if there's nothing here"? I'd have expected any reasonably coded site where that was a possibility to give a "no options available" option in the box and then disable the box, or remove the section completely.

On a more on-topic note: Finally, Webmasters won't be able to design sites with quite such terrible HTML just because that's what IE does! Okay, so the sites might still

Not really more work.

[strredwolf]

It's more like "Oh, it's standards compliant? Okay, we'll just lump IE 8 next to Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari."

Microsoft is losing their competitive advantage

[FranTaylor]

One of their big stated reasons for buying into their infrastructure is that they offer a stable platform for developers so they don't have to keep doing more work every time Microsoft upgrades.

This reason is rapidly falling by the boards. First it was Visual Basic, which has changed so many times that there is no hope of old code running. Then it was the Windows API, where many things that developers did, originally with Microsoft's blessing, now cause security warning dialog boxes in Vista. Now it's their interpretation of HTML, which they convinced many web developers to follow instead of the standard.

Every time a developer codes to a Microsoft "standard", they had better be prepared to make extensive modifications at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully Microsoft's customers are catching on to this trend.

unfortunately?

[nguy]

That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."

I don't see anything "unfortunate" about it. It's about time people fixed their sites.

Re:

[Vectronic]

Indeed.

"Unfortunetly, due to new Government regulations, drug developers will have to be more stringent about the drugs they release, so as to minimize the chance of killing their users"

Plus, this also creates more job opportunities (especially for people familliar with 'standards'), aswell as return coding, "we need to update our website for IE8 and/or to be more standards complient"

If any website coders (who are currently using non-standard coding practices) that are going "shit fuck damnit crap" it's the

Joel on Software: Idealists vs Pragmatists

[redink1]

Joel on Software [joelonsoftware.com] published an excellent article about web standards a few months ago, and it brings up a lot of great, great points. The article is a bit on the long side (and gets side-tracked with an odd analogy), but it is well worth reading. A couple excerpts:

So you have to "test" in your own head, purely as a thought experiment, against a bunch of standards documents which you probably never read and couldn't completely understand even if you did.

Those documents are super confusing. The specs are fu

Re:

[bunratty]

Joel does have a point, but programming portable C is certainly much harder than writing portable web applications. Yet programmers manage to write C code that can work when compiled by many different compilers on many different operating systems. If standards did not assist in writing portable code, we would instead have found another solution to the problem such as having a reference implementation. Yet standards for complicated computer languages continue to be developed. The only problem is when vendors

Re:

[cnettel]

Any non-trivial project of portable C code has autoconf or a bunch of defines and ifdefs, or some conditionally compiled modules (or any combination of these), to actually achieve that portability. It's the equivalent of user-agent hacks.

Re:

[bunratty]

And what would portable C look like if we didn't even have a standard that compilers tried to follow? At least having standards makes it possible to write portable code. Standards are not a fool's errand as Joel tries to make them out to be. They are not a panacea, but following standards is much easier than simply testing in all browsers and hoping for the best.

no. PLEASE NO !

[unity100]

just had to make a site compatible with ie6, ie7 and firefox. please, NOT another browser version that soon. as a developer this is not appeasing me at all, its irritating me.