Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes

Dak RIT writes "In a blog post this week, Microsoft's IE Platform Architect, Chris Wilson, confirmed that IE8 will use three distinct modes to render web pages. The first two modes will render pages the same as IE7, depending on whether or not a DOCTYPE is provided ('Quirks Mode' and 'Standards Mode'). However, in order to take advantage of the improved standards compliance in IE8, Web developers will have to opt-in by adding an additional meta tag to their web pages. This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid 2 test, as was discussed here."

Re:Did I catch that right?

[jessiej]

Since acid tests how web browsers deal with faulty code, and IE8 only passes acid3 if the developer includes a specific meta tag. So how likely is that the developers who are creating faulty code and not testing it will actually know to include the meta tag? There must be a major drawback of using the acid3 compliant mode that we don't know about yet.

Re:Forcing? Look on the bright side.

[ianare]

I've had that problem with Scalix and iceweasel. See here [geticeweasel.org] for the fix.

Re:Wait a second?

[DougWebb]

I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant?

No, actually you'll be adding a tag that says "This page displays properly on IE7, Firefox 2, and some other browsers I tested it with" and it'll be up to the browser to figure out how to be compliant with you. In IE's case, IE8 will see that and say "I'd better render this page like IE7 does, because it probably has IE-specific workarounds that'll render incorrectly in IE8's really-standard-compliant rendering."

When you're good and ready, and you see enough IE8 hits in your access log to make it worthwhile, you can get IE8, test your pages, and if they look good, you can update the tag. It'll be under your control when users start to see the new rendering engine in IE8; you won't have to worry about when your users decide to upgrade themselves.

This approach has some great benefits; the IE team actually can safely break compatibility with IE6 and IE7 specific websites and implement standards correctly, because those websites will continue to be rendered with the existing renderer until they explicitly say it's safe to render with IE8's renderer. If they do this well, all we web developers will need to do is remove any IE-specific workarounds if the browser is not IE6/7... IE8 will be treated like any other standards-compliant browser, with no special coding or styling.

Another great benefit for us developers is that we'll be able to change the new tag to get an IE7 rendering from IE8... no more virtual machines just to have different versions of IE on the system. (Except for IE6, but Microsoft is supposedly going to try to force most IE6 users to IE7 next month.)

I can't tell you how much time I've wasted over the past few years trying to get standards compliant pages to look right in IE6 and IE7. I'll be very happy to be able to have my Apache server insert a response header that says "This page is for IE7; deal with it" and not have to worry that my application is going to break when people start to upgrade to IE8 in-between my releases.

Re:Just Like Before

[IntlHarvester]

I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.

Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.

It doesn't make any sense, because webdevs already have to fix their pages for IE7, and likely means that the standards improvements in IE8 will just be ignored.

Furthermore, they already have a way of handing this, the IF IE comment tag.

Re:Wait a second?

[soliptic]

It was deliberate [wikipedia.org] ;)