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Internet Explorer The Internet Microsoft Upgrades

Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes 525

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."
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Microsoft Confirms IE8 Has 3 Render Modes

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  • Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jawtheshark ( 198669 ) * <{moc.krahsehtwaj} {ta} {todhsals}> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:06PM (#22143712) Homepage Journal

    I have to add a fucking tag to say I'm compliant? That's insane.... Those that fuck up compliancy should be punished. Heck, no, if I specify XHTML strict, it should render strict. The doctype does say enough. Those who want to adhere to standards just say "strict" and that's it. We do not need an additional tag. The doctype is not broken as he says in the article. You fuckers broke it!

    IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change.

    There you have it... It wasn't rendering accurately... Who's at fault, eh?

    He's simply not realising that adding another tag will have the same effect as the doctype... And in 5 years will have a 4th rendering mode. Great! Long live standards, those that I can choose!

    This is a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards compatibility. The standards are open and published, adhere to them.

  • Just Like Before (Score:4, Insightful)

    by excelblue ( 739986 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:07PM (#22143730) Homepage
    Hence again, MS is imposing its powers of monopoly by forcing us to work around their nonstandard quirks, forcing us to add their own meta tag. Nothing much new here - this is still part of embrace, enhance, extinguish.
  • by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:07PM (#22143750) Journal
    So, to get IE8 to behave nice, web developers are responsible? huh?
  • by kharchenko ( 303729 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:08PM (#22143770)
    to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?
  • Makes Sense (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DigitalisAkujin ( 846133 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:08PM (#22143776) Homepage
    This move makes sense but I wish they would stop making up random tricks like that whenever they damn well please. HTML 5 has a way to set render modes while being compliant.

    At least their decision isn't going to mess with any other browsers.
  • A good first step (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gihan_ripper ( 785510 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:12PM (#22143860) Homepage
    This sounds great, but it still means that everyone will have to write slightly different code for interoperability with IE, even if it only involves an additional meta tag. Hopefully, when HTML 5 comes out, the additional meta tag won't be necessary, with the assumption that all HTML 5 web pages will be developed with IE 8 (or another standards-compliant browser) in mind.
  • OOXMLish (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigdavex ( 155746 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:13PM (#22143892)
    sigh.

    <render-like-IE6>
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:14PM (#22143922) Homepage Journal

    This is a misguided attempt of someone trying to keep backwards compatibility. The standards are open and published, adhere to them.
    Come meet the new Microsoft. Same as the old Microsoft.

    You really expected true standards compliance? I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell you!
  • by dedazo ( 737510 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:15PM (#22143964) Journal
    Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds? I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks. So you can accept that IE is not going anywhere soon and that this is the only realistic way to handle this problem (admittedly created by Microsoft themselves), or you can go back to the previous crap situation.

    The comments on the blog to the tone of "break the web" are amusing. I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know, some technorati bloggers with snazzy-looking web sites signed the W3C suicide pact and wanted everyone to do the same.

    Or, use Firefox and convince everyone to do as well. That's what I've been doing lately. Maybe IE8 will pull me back, but IE7 sure has heck didn't.

  • by denis-The-menace ( 471988 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:16PM (#22143988)
    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. ["super standards"], you []get it by inserting a simple element.

    Why to do have to add a tag to "say" it's standard.
    Change the name of mode 2 to "Almost standard" and get people to use that tag there!
  • by rattlesoft ( 1086131 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:19PM (#22144028) Homepage
    I, for one, welcome our new standards complaint Internet Explorer overlords.

    On a serious note, it makes some sense why they require you to opt-in. Reason being, that alot of websites are designed to "hack" Internet Explorer to look right and forcing all of those sites to be updated to the new standards will take time.

    It's easier to force all new websites or updated websites opt-in rather than forcing ALL websites to update to the new Internet Explorer.
  • by JonTurner ( 178845 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:19PM (#22144034) Journal
    Now's as good a time as any to check for browser type. If IE, redirect to the "You are using an non-standard browser" page with a link to GetFirefox.com
  • by JackHoffman ( 1033824 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:21PM (#22144074)
    It's brilliant: The reason is that there are too many websites out there which work in IE6, but fail miserably in standards compliant browsers. These websites will of course not get that tag. For the the tag to make any sense at all, newer IE browsers must therefore assume that an untagged site expects IE6, so the page will be shown as if the browser were the steaming pile of crap IE6. It's another quirks mode just for IE6, and the only way to escape it is to add a redundant tag.
  • by TheOnlyJuztyn ( 813918 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:22PM (#22144082)
    ... to have the special meta tag required to get the page to render in IE6/7's "Standards" mode.
  • by Len ( 89493 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:22PM (#22144084)
    There's some kinda BS somewhere...

    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.

    So how could IE8 possibly have passed the Acid2 test? The test page doesn't contain the magic META tag that IE needs to pass the test!

  • by texwtf ( 558874 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:27PM (#22144170)
    ... stupidfucksjustdontgetit (tagging beta)

    Is this really helpful to anyone, anyone at all?

    Tagging sucks and is also stupid and unhelpful. Can we kill it now, please?
  • by rale, the ( 659351 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:29PM (#22144226)
    Well, for serious developers, it means only having to look at the documentation on the actual standards, rather than scour the web for information detailing every rendering quirk in IE. Not that I'm defending the idea of having to add an extra tag just to make it work right, but if that's the only option, then it beats the alternative of dealing with random-IE-brokeness.
  • by Moskie ( 620227 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:30PM (#22144236)
    They probably ran a closed test that used (forced) this third render mode on the HTML.
  • by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:30PM (#22144240) Homepage Journal

    I know that was a joke, but the answer is no, it uses a standard HTML tag.

    Which is used to add a non-standard HTTP header, "X-UA-Compatible". Standard HTML, non-standard HTTP.

    Which leads to the great possibility of a webpage looking different on the local computer compared to the server it was originally downloaded from...

  • by Chris_Jefferson ( 581445 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:30PM (#22144244) Homepage
    Microsoft really had 4 options:

    1) Don't try to support standards properly.
    2) Obey the DOCTYPE, even though many programs and people put it on old pages which aren't going to render properly in a standards-compliant browser
    3) Add a new flag that means "Yes, I promise I know about standards".

    For years, they have been doing (1). It would be nice if they did (2), and just broke all the badly written IE 6 pages with an improper DOCTYPE. But they aren't going to do that, their users don't want them to do that, and to be honest I don't either. That leaves them with adding a new flag which lets people admit they know about standards.

    In their favour, they are:
    1) Designing the option in such a way other browsers can be extended by it
    2) You can pass it as a HTML header, so if you want just add it to your apache config, and all pages on your website will be rendered in IE8 cleanly (this is the option I intend to take).

    Yes, this isn't perfect and it is evil Microsoft, but it's bettered than I'd hoped for. I'm looking forward to popping the option into my apache config and seeing if IE8 really is standards compliant.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spyowl ( 838397 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:30PM (#22144264)
    Exactly. Microsoft picks and chooses how they treat standards, and that hasn't changed with upcoming IE8. Consider the quote below from the MSDN blog:

    In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way. Because sites expected IE6 behavior, the DOCTYPE switch failed to protect compatibility in the real world when we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant.

    So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards and set the proper expectations with their developers and their customers; and then faked the standards mode for their own benefit to be backward compatible to the broken rendering mode they had before. Nice twist to the truth though - would have probably made it through some junior VB script kiddies if it was more sugar coded.
  • by Pulzar ( 81031 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:41PM (#22144436)
    That would make a hell of a lot of pages render poorly by default -- some of them long abandoned, yet still providing useful information. This seems like a good compromise that doesn't break any existing pages... yet it still encourages standards-compliance, because with this tag, you can write once for both IE8 and Firefox and have it work in both.

    Stan
  • by sholden ( 12227 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:44PM (#22144480) Homepage
    It will have the rendering engines for 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 embedded in it. Along with the javascript engines for them and so on. Just to support all the people forced to use these tags to access features in the meantime...

    Sounds wonderful.

  • by mr_mischief ( 456295 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:45PM (#22144520) Journal
    I believe jessiej meant, "and only testing in standards-compliant browsers and not in IE". The whole idea of standards compliance is that once the browsers are compliant any code that does the right thing in one standards-compliant browser works the same elsewhere.

    Requiring a non-standard tag to be part of a standards-compliant page isn't standards-compliant. The standards says nothing about adding tags that aren't part of the standards. How could they?

    The real fix here would be for MS to either: support IE 6 in making it standards compliant or report to its customers that it is not standards compliant and that pages written for it are not either. Maybe a good work-around for people who broke their sites by writing to IE 6 would be to add a tag that says to use IE 6's render mode. IT shouldn't be the people following the standards who have to make the change.

    What MS is counting on two things with this botch. One is that it's the people who didn't care if anything but IE 6 worked who won't be bothered to update anything. The other is that people who cared enough about standards and cross-browser compatibility to do extra work then will care enough about IE 8 now to do a little extra.

  • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:46PM (#22144548) Homepage
    So many people think Microsoft is a software company. Actually Microsoft is an abuse company. Sloppy software is just one method Microsoft uses to deliver abuse.

    If you want software, choose some other company. If you want abuse, Microsoft is one of the world's larger suppliers of time wasting hassles for technically knowledgeable people.

    Billionaires don't need more money. Many billionaires believe they need people to abuse; they want people they think are socially below them. That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior.

    My opinion, but in my experience not far wrong.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by andr0meda ( 167375 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:47PM (#22144570) Journal

    So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards


    Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?

    Anyway. Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.
  • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:48PM (#22144586) Homepage
    Only people simply won't bother, they will just write the same crappy nonstandard HTML they have for IE6 because it still works.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:48PM (#22144598)
    The quote specifically says 'This improved standards mode is the same that was recently reported to pass the Acid2 test..'.

    In other words, when IE is running in this standards mode, it can pass Acid2. And I'm pretty sure the IE developers can programmatically enable it for testing. They could even enable it and then browse to sites like, oh, I don't know... the Acid2 test? The fact that you need a META tag to run IE in standards mode doesn't mean that standards mode can't pass Acid2.
  • by dedazo ( 737510 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:49PM (#22144614) Journal
    That imposes a burden on the company, and that won't fly. Not under the "but we made it standards-compliant" banner. Like I said, in the corporate world no one gives a crap about standards. No one. Why? Because companies standardize on a single browser, and as long as everything works with that then life is good. Even upgrades from IE4->IE5->IE6->IE7 were peanuts in most cases compared to what would happen if IE suddenly decided to try and render every single page as mandated by the W3C.
  • by tobiasly ( 524456 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:53PM (#22144704) Homepage

    to be standards compliant, web pages have to incorporate a non-standard tag?

    You don't have to include the tag. You can use a server-side user-agent browser sniffing check to see whether or not to include the IE-specific meta tag hack!

    Of course, the really funny part is that the whole reason they're doing this is that too many people misused the DOCTYPE declaration in the first place -- declaring that their pages should use Strict rendering when in fact they used the old IE6 hacks. So who wants to bet that MS will need to introduce another browser hack for IE9 because too many web developers set this new hack to "IE=edge" or whatever to be "future-proof"?

    As they say, make something idiot-proof, and the universe will just invent better idiots. The only problem is that MS feels the compelling urge to cater to these new, improved, uber-idiots.

  • by JackHoffman ( 1033824 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:55PM (#22144738)
    The header is touted as a replacement or augmentation of the doctype definition, which is supposedly broken. Well, it's not. IE can't handle doctypes properly because too many pages were designed-for-IE6 with wrong doctypes and leave newer versions no viable path to standard compliance without being treated like other standards compliant browsers (i.e. identifying as something other than IE.)

    So, in order to have their cake and eat it too, Microsoft wants IE to be backwards-compatible to IE6 and more modern at the same time. The only way to do that is to make everybody add a redundant tag, and they trashtalk doctype to get their will. But doctype says to which standard a document was written. Microsoft on the other hand wants developers to keep writing pages to browser versions, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

    The correct way to solve this is to make new IE versions identify as something new, like MSWB, and provide an IE6 compatible control for applications which request MSIE. And tell developers to write to standards, not browsers, and test with more than one browser!
  • WAAAAAIT! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by shoolz ( 752000 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:57PM (#22144788) Homepage
    50% of the web would to break the moment IE8 is rolled out. Isn't it kind of nice to have the option as a webmaster to cause IE8 to render it the old way until you've had a chance to undo all your IE6 kludges and prep the site for IE8?
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by random0xff ( 1062770 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:02PM (#22144868)
    It's pretty simple really, Microsoft is built on backwards compatibility. Saying that those who are not standards compliant should be punished by IE will NOT be heard by Microsoft. It's not just that they don't agree, they don't BELIEVE that it should be that way. They feel this (misplaced?) sense of responsibility not to break the web. Nothing we say (on the IE blog or here) will change that way of thinking.

    Anyway, Microsoft can scratch ACID 2 rendering now, since it will only render in IE 8 with the new meta tag (which should point out to the IE team the error of their ways).
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cp.tar ( 871488 ) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:06PM (#22144966) Journal


    So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards


    Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?

    Anyway. Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.

    Or leave it broken for the people without a proper browser.

    If it's strict, it's strict. If your browser cannot render strict properly, go and bitch to the manufacturer.

  • Then opt-out. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:07PM (#22144980) Journal
    First, if you're a webmaster who only designed for IE6, shame on you. If you designed for other browsers, which were mostly standards compliant, you should be able to just swap in one of those for IE8, with minimal tweaking. (Or maybe IE8 isn't that compliant, hmm?)

    But more importantly, they are adding a non-standard tag to indicate standards-compliance, which is just fucked up. How about you use a non-standard tag to indicate non-standards-compliance -- to indicate that you want the old way of doing things? How about you just drop your DOCTYPE?

    If you don't maintain your website enough to even be able to do that, I don't see how that's Microsoft's fault. And it really pisses me off that Microsoft has the audacity to demand that the rest of the world code specifically for IE. You had to do that before, anyway, but this is the first time they've publicly admitted it. Can we have our antitrust suit back, please?
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:14PM (#22145118) Journal

    IE is like most software not bugfree,

    And that is not an excuse.

    Firefox is not bugfree -- it leaks like a sieve (or "fragments"), chewing up half your RAM. Konqueror is not bugfree -- it crashes maybe every day or two for me. I'm sure Safari and Opera each have their own bugs.

    But I can relatively easily make a website -- even a web app -- which works the same way in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, and so on. This is the first 90% of the project. The other 90% is making it work on IE.

    it's unrealistic to expect every webpage around the world to get checked and fixed every time they fix a bug, and it's equally unrealistic to expect every page to follow the standard if there's a good chance it can be made to look right in IE.

    Why is it unrealistic to ask people to follow the standard, and to let IE be buggy? Why should we be working around Microsoft's bugs for them?

    Honestly, they should have simply made a compatibility tag from the start which basicly means "render like IE4/5/6/7/8/latest, DON'T apply any later bugfixes because we've worked around them".

    Perhaps, but has it occurred to you that this is exactly what DOCTYPEs are for? So that when XHTML 6.0 comes out, browsers will still be able to deal with XHTML 5?

  • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:15PM (#22145162) Journal
    I agree with the sentiment, but we have to live in the real world. IE still holds the dominant position, and is a defacto standard. What would be nice is if Microsoft could even make things work properly between versions. The whole thing is a fucking nightmare, and what makes it worse is the number of crappy little apps that rely on IE, so that you can't even say "Fuck it" and move to Firefox or Safari.

    If there's any justice, some day some government will fine Microsoft a hundred trillion dollars, not specifically for being a monopolist, but for being completely incompetent. I think the reason they want to keep their code, protocols and formats a secret is because the real secret is that for all that money, Microsoft may be occupied by the biggest pack of mental retards the world has ever known.
  • by misleb ( 129952 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:20PM (#22145244)
    Actually, it is a lot easier to develop a site in strict/picky mode because a simple HTML/CSS validation will often tell you what is wrong. Where you might spend hours debugging something manually when using a "quirks" mode. Quirks mode is for lazy developers who think that they save time by not closing their P tags.

    It is like developing Perl or C with full warnings turned on. It can be a pain to satisfy every pedantic complaint of the parser, but eventually you learn to do it right the first time and you might even find that the warnings indicate a much more serious error in the program logic.

    -matthew
  • by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:25PM (#22145306) Journal

    Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds?

    How about option 3: Code to the standards, and ignore specific browsers. Obviously, you want to test it in other browsers to expose flaws in your own code/assumptions, but if a browser doesn't work due to actually being non-standard, I want that to be Not My Problem.

    I've spent enough of my life hacking workarounds around Microsoft crap. How about they work around the standard for a change?

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

    They already did, to some extent, with IE7.

    Keep in mind, these billions of pages were already broken. They should not have been compatible with anything. Microsoft dropping compatibility for them would actually be a healthy thing, compared with, say, some of the things they broke with Vista.

    I'd like to see the face of a CIO when his architect tells him that the corporate-wide upgrade to IE8 broke half the apps on the intranet because, you know,

    Because, you know, he was a moron who didn't test those apps on IE8 before rolling it out. Didn't know about WSUS, you know. Can I have his job when he's fired for incompetence?

    Again: Same thing happened with IE7. Same kind of complaints, same intranets keeping everyone on IE6 for awhile.

    The only reason you mention this is the same reason it's not a problem: On intranets, apps tend to be more tied to a single browser, because you can mandate that browser. Because the alternative was even worse -- mandating the install of some custom client-side app, maybe some Visual Basic + Access crap. This same freedom that lets intranet sites be lazy with respect to the standards also allows them to delay IE8 as long as they want -- or, yeah, use Firefox.

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:33PM (#22145436) Homepage
    Obviously, and this is the manufacturer's solution.

    I don't really know what people want from Microsoft now. They screwed up--it's obvious. They know it, we know it, web developers know it. Nevertheless, web developers have had to work around incompatibilities for years. What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people? Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site? It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:37PM (#22145504)
    I am as much of an IE hater as anyone. It has been crippling the web for years. However, what they are doing is necessary to ensure adoption of IE8 and advance the web.

    Let's face it, the people dumb enough to be using IE are not the first to be updating. If MS releases a browser that broke sites of say an corporate intraweb site, the sysadmins will not update it, and IE6 will be with us forever.

    This is the reason IE7 is still low in market share! A recent polling of my sites indicated 60% percent of IE users are still using IE6. I hate IE6 and do not want to support it anymore, so if this will rid the earth of IE6 then fine.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JackHoffman ( 1033824 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:44PM (#22145632)
    Another great benefit for us developers is that we'll be able to change the new tag to get an IE7 rendering from IE8

    Seriously, you're new to this, aren't you? Not only will you have to test your page with browsers running in virtual machines, over the course of time you'll have to test it in IE8 pretending to be IE7, IE8 pretending to be IE6, IE9 pretending to be IE8, IE9 pretending to be IE7, and so on as you change the tag to benefit from newer rendering modes. All those render modes will either use combined code, which means they won't render exactly as the old versions, or they are essentially multiple browsers in one, which means they'll each have their own security vulnerabilities and plugin incompatibilities.

    This page is for IE7; deal with it

    Added benefit for Microsoft: They get to write their own standards again. If another browser sees that made-for-IE7 tag, it must recreate all of IE7's quirks (and those of IE6 and IE8 and IE9...), i.e. behave like some closed source software from Microsoft. MS DOC deja vu...

    I really hope that the other browser developers show MS the finger on this one, because if you thought browsers are memory hogs and security nightmares now, wait until every browser has to implement all its predecessors' quirks and all its predecessors' competitions' quirks.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cp.tar ( 871488 ) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:46PM (#22145666) Journal

    That's absolutely asinine. Just because Microsoft screwed up by not making their browser standards compliant, doesn't mean you should punish a majority of the users of it's browser. A lot of people haven't even heard of other browsers that are better, so why should they be punished?

    No. They should be educated.
    Inform them they are using a non-compliant browser and send them to download Firefox.

    And if they insist on using a deficient product, it is not my problem.

    Meh, it's your loss. When you have fewer customers because only a certain percentage of them can view your website, you'll realize that your OMGWTFBLAMEEVERYONE attitude was truly the one at fault, not MS.

    I am an educator.

    Every user I educate is a win for me.
    And for everybody else, in the end.

  • by Jorgensen ( 313325 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @06:46PM (#22145672) Homepage

    I agree. That is what they should do.

    But they won't. Why? Because improving cross-browser compatibility is bad for Microsoft (the very thought of making it possible for customers to escape vendor lock-in is the epitome of heresy!), despite it being good for the world in general.

    Since this is a decision that Microsoft has to take (it's their product after all), the outcome should not really surprise anybody: They'll always do what's best for them, regardless of the consequences for others. Nothing new here.

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @07:13PM (#22146072) Journal

    What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people?

    Yes. To anyone this affects: Your website was broken in the first place. It is partly MS' fault that it was broken, but mostly yours, for not trying it out with other browsers.

    Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site?

    Yes. Let them add hacks like <use-fucked-up-block-model>. Don't make the standards compliant people have to add <dont-fuck-up-my-box-model/>.

    (Yes, I realize it's an HTTP header. You think that makes it better? I mean, yeah, great -- now "save as" on webpages will break them, unless they're using <http-equiv>. And yes, it's got a browser version number in there!)

    It's a bad situation, and it's Microsoft's fault to begin with, but what solution would you propose that wouldn't inconvenience a lot of end users (both developers and their customers, alike)?

    I wouldn't. I'd much rather have a little short-term inconvenience, if it means that in the long term, we can forget about all this. Maybe even forgive.

    But no, we got the opposite -- something that works in the short term, but will come back to haunt us in the long term. I'm really not looking forward to the <no-really-I-mean-it-standards-compliant-this-time> tag with IE9 in another few years. Nor am I looking forward to IE15 unintentionally introducing a bug in the IE6 compatibility, breaking some decade-old site out of the blue -- I'd much rather it be broken now, when there's a greater chance someone's actually paying attention enough to fix it.

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beav007 ( 746004 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @07:30PM (#22146342) Journal
    Because in the web design world, that's not how it works. You spend 90% of your time making the website. It then takes another 90% to make it render properly in IE without breaking it in more standards compliant browsers, thus causing you take 80% more time to create the site than it should have.

    It's just like any other project in the software world. The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the time.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JackHoffman ( 1033824 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @07:37PM (#22146442)
    First, instead of pretending that this is a doctype problem, own up the mistake and explain that IE6 created the problem which needs to be fixed.

    The only actual problem is that many IE6-only pages exist which declare a wrong doctype. A solution to that does not need to be extended into a mechanism which makes it a standard compliant behaviour to design to specific browsers and browser versions. The proposed solution puts Microsoft in the position where they can continue to disregard standards, because as long as the document declares for which browser it is written, every other browser has to cope, should this become a standard.

    In conclusion, Microsoft could either provide a new browser which faces the same problems as every other browser, i.e. not being recognized as IE and therefore being excluded from certain pages and web applications, alongside a compatibility browser which emulates IE6 for those legacy applications. Or Microsoft could simply push for a new version of HTML, complete with a new doctype, which a new browser version would then render accurately while treating older doctypes like IE7 or IE6 does today. The only thing they really need is a way of saying "this is a new page, no quirks mode, for real" and a new HTML doctype would do that just fine.

    What they propose is the same compatibility scheme which has failed miserably in Word: Each version of Word creates its own "standard" of the DOC file format and every successive version has to render all versions of that format. Even Microsoft, despite having the code to the older Word versions, doesn't get that right. Competitors don't even stand a chance because there is no specification and no code to look at. Do you really want that for the web? That kind of mess is exactly why standards and accompanying standards replaced the proprietary Netscape vs. Microsoft tag soup.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @07:46PM (#22146570) Journal
    You really expected true standards compliance? I am SHOCKED! SHOCKED I tell you!

    Oh come on. You and the OP should take a second and THINK before running your collective mouths off.

    There is nothing wrong with using a special (standards compliant) tag to tell the browser to render differently than normal. In addition to preventing tens of thousands of websites from breaking, there are plenty of CDs and other media containing websites written over the last 10 years. Should all these become unusable just because Microsoft updated their browser? Is adding one tag really that much trouble for you?

    I know it's fashionable on Slashdot to say things like "NOT STANDARDS COMPLIANT!?! HOW DARE THEY!!1" (and then get modded up for it!), however the real world requires more tact than that. Coming up with a solution like this that unifies the three Trident rendering modes (quirks, IE6, standard) is pretty elegant. It keeps real old sites from breaking. It keeps sites made in the last 7 years from breaking. Above all, it gives web authors the ability to fine-tune the way their page renders without a bunch of hacks.

    Is it ideal? Obviously not, but unless you've got a time machine and can fix the problem, please shut up. Bitching about the past doesn't do anything except give people headaches. It's worth wondering if Microsoft's dedication to backwards-compatibility has anything to do with their success. It's popular around here to say "get with the times" but in the business world, that means money. The supposed "bit rot" is an artificial and man-made result of ignoring this fact.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @08:02PM (#22146756)
    They should be inconvenienced, then perhaps in future they'll put more thought into what they choose to make use of.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @08:27PM (#22147032)
    Your experience with billionaires, I'm guessing, consists of loathing them from a distance while imbuing them with characteristics that enhance your existing opinion and ignoring anything to the contrary.
  • by ThePromenader ( 878501 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @08:35PM (#22147134) Homepage Journal
    ...and that extra meta tag is just a peevy way of trying to oblige everyone to think "Microsoft! Microsoft! (is everywhere!)". MS and Karl Rove must share the same condescending views on humanity - and of course, even with all their respective faults and failings, think themselves above it - and spend most of (their|other people's) time and money trying to (convince themselves|convey to us) that they weren't at fault - without really saying it. Take this phrase for example:

    "IE6's rendering behavior was not updated for five years, leading many developers to assume its rendering was both accurate and unlikely to change."
    ..."Accurate"!? Not a word I would use to describe that browser's rendering - nor one any decent webmaster would use to describe the same, either. What a load of two-bit high-school lawyer spin - that is supposed to "cover up" six years of complete - and stubborn - failure?

    I was initially happy that MS wised up and decided to play straight with their browser - happy FOR them - but now I couldn't give a fuck. Talk about a company wasting a chance at recieving a widespread feeling of goodwill from the thinking community - the first since decades, if ever.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @08:37PM (#22147156)
    You shouldn't have to add a tag just to get the browser to work correct in the first place. Let's all remember that there's already a doctype tag. If you have a doctype tag, and your document doesn't comply to that spec, then that's your own fault. Be it XHTML Strict, HTML 4 Strict, or whatever other doc type you've specified, that is how it should be rendered. If MS has now come up with a more correct way to render properly formatted documents, then they should render all the documents that say they are standards compliant.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ash Vince ( 602485 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:06PM (#22147520) Journal

    You shouldn't have to add a tag just to get the browser to work correct in the first place.
    Maybe in your strange web utopia, but here in there real world I have spent the last 5 year developing websites for people who only gave a shit about IE and sometimes gave me a deadline of the day before I started the project (the work I started today was due on Friday). I can honestly say that a large proportion of the work I have done will not render in my chosen browser (mozilla under linux).

    I am not proud of this but with tight deadlines cross browser standards compliance is the first thing to slip if you know you are developing a corporate intranet and all the client has deployed is IE6. Anyone who insists on developing for other browers in this situation is just wasting time and hence money.

    I do not develop complicated dynamic websites as a religion or hobby, I do it as a job so tailor each project to the clients needs, not my own.
  • Um, you've managed to compare Microsoft to slaveowners. While not *completely* out of the realm of imagination, for many of the "enslaved" their condition is actually completely voluntary. There are alternatives; my wife saw Ubuntu, fell in love with it, and refuses to use Windows now. Which is great, because I was able to free up that hard drive space. And she knows virtually nothing about how computers work.

    As for this quote:

    That was the reason for slavery, too; just rich people wanting to feel that they are superior.
    Which grade are you in, third or fourth? The awful fact that people could profit from ownership of another human being, much as one might profit from a sled dog, was the reason for slavery, for just about as long as mankind has existed. Was it a horrible institution? Sure. Did the average slaveholder base his practice of slave ownership on some warm fuzzy feeling of "I'm so awesome?" Well, no. Landowners increased their wealth by owning slaves who increased the profits of their business endeavors, not the other way around. By the way, the majority of American slaveholders in the South weren't all that well off by comparison. Why don't you spend a little less time on the heartfelt backyard historical psychoanalysis and a little more working to educate yourself properly?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:15PM (#22147588)

    But apparently you keep buying their products.

    Microsoft users are funny. Bitch and moan about Microsoft on the one hand, yet bitch and moan any time somebody suggests switching to anything else.

    What incentive does Microsoft have to stop "abusing" you? They continually release crap software, and their customers continually throw money at them, expecting that *this* time it'll be different, this time they'll get what was promised. How many times do they have to fool you before you realize what's going on? It's really hard to pity somebody who keeps asking for more.

    You've chosen Microsoft, now live with the consequences and stop whining.

  • by Oliver Defacszio ( 550941 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:20PM (#22147634)
    If you're going to spout eye-rolling baloney like that, then I think you should take it all the way:

    So please, name one software product of any consequence (meaning, fifty liners don't count), that has a UI, that has ever, throughout all the history of meaningful software, been absolutely free of gotchas. I've been hammering away at these damned electronic boxes for 19 years, both privately and professionally, and I have yet to ever see even one that didn't offer up *something* stupid. For the size and complexity of the applications that Microsoft produces, they have no more idiocy than anything else.

    But, since you're obviously so plugged into the mind of Microsoft (much like the other million Slashdotters), I'll wait here while you put your money where your mouth is.
  • This stuff isn't abuse, although it may qualify as "producing a crappy product." How many times have you made a spelling error on a business document? Were you abusing your intended audience?

    Heavily used open source software, including GCC, doesn't always work as it should. Are the authors just downright nasty, abusive people? I don't think so, man. You need some sedatives. Sorry about my abusive nature.
  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EdelFactor19 ( 732765 ) <adam.edelstein@nOSpAM.alum.rpi.edu> on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:29PM (#22147728)
    or you could just code to standards to begin with... then it would work wherever. This isn't like programming an application in C to run on linux or windows and needing complicated macros to ensure that the right libraries and api's (system calls) are used. This is a freaking XML document. If you actually wrote it properly it would work EVERYWHERE; there is no "porting it to work on mozilla/firefox".

    Its a lot like hard coding type sizes in a c program; you could write " int a = (int *)malloc(4);" becuase on your platform ints are size 4... but if you wrote the damn thing properly the first time, using the sizeof operator to get the size of an int, it would work EVERYWHERE.

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by edumacator ( 910819 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:51PM (#22147978)

    I agree with you in principle, - And as a caveat, I'll point out, I'm only trying to learn to code to standards now - but I think the GP is pointing out, that in order to code to standards and then have a page render well in IE6, is more time consuming than coding specifically for IE6.

    I think we would all agree that's relatively short sighted, but many people don't look at the big picture when they are up against a hard deadline. One could argue, that looking back, it would make more sense to code to standards, so when the client deploys IE7, the program wouldn't become archaic.

    As I'm learning to code to standards...slowly...I have begun to understand the loathing so many coders have for MS. But they are in a tough spot on this one. It's easy for us to say, "Well it's the designers fault if his site doesn't render well in a compliant browser. But as a business, if IE8 doesn't render my mom's favorite knitting site that was created by some knitter in FrontPage, she isn't going to think that the designer was crap...she'll think it's the new fangled thingy that her son installed (Of course I would install FF, but just supposing...) that isn't working right, and IE8 loses market share.

    Hopefully over time, the extra tag will become superfluous as really bad websites are deprecated. And IE9 will be perfect. (Giggles at the funny joke.)

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fallen Seraph ( 808728 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:59PM (#22148062)
    Ummm, way to insult sysadmins. I work in IT at the world's 10th largest company, and we've gone so far as to install firefox with IEView for the intranet web portal just so we can get that garbage off our machines.

    What they need to do is release IE8 with a "surf as IE7" and "surf as IE6" option. So the USER can control it, and the web will be the same. Eventually those pages still coded for IE6 will move on to standards compliance and that button will simply be ignored.
  • Sad, but true (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stewby18 ( 594952 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @10:22PM (#22148270)
    I wish this were funny, but it's not. Many, many sites (including lots of big name sites--Yahoo anyone?) look for "Firefox" and the Firefox version they want, rather than the Gecko version that has been available in the UA since before Firefox was called Firefox, and if your browser isn't called Firefox (and isn't Netscape, IE, or Safari), tough luck.

    It really sucks for anyone trying to use (or build) a Gecko-based browser that's not Firefox.
  • by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @10:49PM (#22148480)
    If someone one hands you a standard to implement, you don't say, "hey that's stupid, I'm just going to do it this other way instead."

    That is just beyond stupid.

    Hell, I'd even be ok if MS had said, "w3c width is stupid, I'll just add a new tag, exwidth which does it the way we think makes sense." Because at least then they could still support the standard width tag to the standard, and render pages written to the standard correctly. If someone found exwidth easier to use, and used it instead those pages would also render fine in IE, and then break elsewhere in other browsers... although I could easily see support for 'exwidth' become a de-facto part of the standard and implemented in netscape/mozilla/firefox/whatever if enough people wanted it and enough pages used it... and that would be fine too. (In that at least we wouldn't have the mess we're in now.)

    Bottom line, when your writing to a standard, write to the standard. If you don't like the standard, fine create your own (even if "your own" is just the original with some extensions), but don't write a broken implementation on purpose. It NEVER works out well for anybody. Users, developers, everybody suffers.

  • by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @10:56PM (#22148552)
    But so why keep all the names of the standard yet behave in a non-standard way? All they had to do was call it internal-padding or ie-padding instead of padding and we'd all have been spared the pain. I'm not the biggest fan of the way CSS was spec'd, either, but if you must diverge from a standard at least make it clear that you are diverging!
  • by ThePromenader ( 878501 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2008 @03:26AM (#22150376) Homepage Journal
    But you can't compare all OS's and applications as if they all have the same work ethics, ideas and development resources.

    MS is a company that has had a) few original ideas but b) HUGE resources - the difference between the two, in addition to their decades of constant, stubborn fuck-ups, smacks of mismanagement and sheer technological incompetence, making them one of the "worst" (inexcusable) software companies out there; or perhaps they simply don't care, as, in spite of all their product's faults, people keep buying them.
  • by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Wednesday January 23, 2008 @04:50AM (#22150746) Journal

    By some defintions it's always been broken, since it doesn't comply with the spec. But users seeing a broken page on a broken browser that looks right doesn't care.

    The only reason we are having this conversation is the 800-pound-gorilla in the room -- IE is a fucking monopoly.

    Were IE not a fucking monopoly, what would happen is, users would see the broken page in a compliant browser. You seem to agree...

    And for the users on a compliant browser it will always be broken regardless of tagging.

    But you see, if there was sufficient marketshare for compliant browsers, or if most browsers were mostly compliant, no one would be stupid enough to release a webpage which doesn't work with them. Just as today, people can be called stupid for releasing a page that doesn't work in IE.

    Imagine a scenario where there are five browsers, all equally popular. If a page works in four out of those five browsers, do users blame the page, or the browser? If this happens consistently, for a lot of pages, and it's always the same one, don't you think that one browser would be rushing to patch the problem?

    And do you honestly think that anyone would have a page that only works in one of the five? That would be like (pardon the analogy) releasing a Ford-only radio, which would actually explode if you put it in a Chevy.

    But, you see, IE is a fucking monopoly, so this actually does happen -- people actually do make IE-only sites, targeted towards a specific version of IE. Meanwhile, I try to make standards-compliant sites that render well in Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, and even Lynx, and I try to be in a situation where I don't have to care if IE is broken -- partly because it is more future-proof, in that if IE ever gets it right, that page will render properly in IE, also.

  • Re:Wait a second? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2008 @09:40AM (#22152176)
    They all use IE6 now. In 5 years, people will probably still be using that intranet application. Will they all still using IE6? It's a lot easier to code to standards and work around the bugs than it is to code to one specific version of one specific browser, and hope that nobody will ever want to use a different browser for your application.
  • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2008 @09:46AM (#22152248) Homepage
    There's a difference between making mistakes and having a corporate culture that deliberately pursues policies that are adversarial toward users. One of those policies, deliberately not following standards, is what started this discussion.

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