IE8 Will Be Standards-Compliant By Default

A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly. We've previously discussed IE8's render mode a few times. Perhaps Opera's complaint to the EU or the EU's record antitrust fine had something to do with Redmond's about-face.

Correct link

[RockMFR]

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx [msdn.com]

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[bunratty]

Firefox 2 is one of the most standards compliant [webdevout.net] browsers around. What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox? Check out the link I provided to webdevout's information on browser standards support before you reply...

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[SEE]

They've said it already passes Acid2.

+1 Informative

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You may be new around here, so you don't fully get the moderation rules yet.

If you moderate in a thread and then post in it afterwards, all moderation will be erased. This happens even if you are posting anonymously.

Re:Put it all on Silverlight!?!

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

By standards compliant they pretty much just mean HTML CSS javascript and the DOM. There are many web technologies, but there isn't a single browser that fully supports all of the standards you listed. I wish there was. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[CastrTroy]

So does Safari. Yet from my experience it has way more rendering bugs than most other browsers I've used and tested against. Passing Acid2 does not mean that it is standards compliant. For instance. IE doesn't support the :last-child pseudo-class, but that doesn't appear in Acid2. So even if it does pass Acid2, it may still not support this feature.

Re:Windows Versions?

[niteice]

Informative? mods on crack, as usual

That link is from 2004.

Re:Question

[bunratty]

Sites that depend on the behavior of IE7 will break unless they add a tag saying they are designed specifically for IE7. Sites that were developed according to standards, and do not rely on the behavior of specific versions of specific browsers, will not break. This is the advantage of designing web sites according to the standards. As a further advantage, they also tend to work in other browsers and on other operating systems.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What other browser does significantly better overall at standards compliance than Firefox?

Well, since the link you provide is largely question marks for the Webkit based browsers, that's hard to say. Also, the comparison you link to is missing a lot of standards where Firefox is a bit behind. These include:

• Javascript - Safari, Opera, and Konquerer all have at least some support for Javascript DOM 3, which Firefox lacks in the released versions so far.
• image formats - Konquerer supports MNG, Tiff, and PDF. Safari supports JPEG 2000, Tiff, and PDF. I know of no standard image formats Firefox supports not supported by both of those (yet).
• XHTML 1.1 lists Firefox at 63% and question marks for Safari and Konquerer, but wikipedia currently lists both of those as having "full support" and Firefox as "partial."
• Web Forms 2.0 - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
• Voice XML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't
• WML - Opera supports, Firefox doesn't

That is not to say Firefox is necessarily behind other browser for standards compliance in general. No one with a clue would cite the Acid tests as proof of anything in that regard, but it does indicate that the link you provide is not particularly strong evidence one way or another. The whole question is probably too vague to be answered. There are a lot of Web standards and what really matters is which ones are most universally supported and what functionality cannot be used because of lacking support in one browser or another.

In summary, I reject your assertion, not because I'm convinced you're wrong, but because you haven't provided enough evidence to support it and there is significant contradictory evidence (cited above).

Re:Hmmmm

[Apocalypse111]

There's still one big reason not to switch back to IE - security. I don't want to go look at the open web using an integral part of my OS, thanks.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Which, in actual terms, means that people code to Firefox just as they code to IE. It just so happens that coding your page to look right in Firefox is a helluva lot closer to the standard (if not it exactly) than when you do the same in IE.

I disagree. At my last employer I used OmniWeb for a while (a very niche browser). Most of the Web UI developers used Firefox, but a couple used Konquerer. A few used Safari. A few used Camino. A few used Opera. Regardless of what you used, when you found a bug, you tested it with a couple of other browsers and if the remote Windows box was available (or you had an emulator running), you tested it on multiple browsers and multiple platforms.

The upshot of all of this was, when a bug was listed, it was pretty easy to see which bugs were specific to a given browser. Bugs that appeared in some version of IE, but in no other browser at all, were by far the most common occurrence. Realistically our approach boiled down to, "write to standards; then hack for IE. " Make no mistake, we did not code for some other browser then try to make it work on every one, because that was not needed for the most part. We were programmatically generating Web pages and interfaces from XML data and a couple of databases. For the vast majority of the time, all browsers but IE were close enough to the standards we used (HTML3, CSS2, XHTML) so that there were no discrepancies when tested.

Re:This Will Cost MS Dearly

[tobiasly]

I can't for the life of me figure out why MS would want to put their neck on the line like this

You must not have read the press release [microsoft.com]!

"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue"

They aren't putting their neck on the line... it's already there. :)

Acid2 is now obsolete!

[Spy der Mann]

IE doesn't support the :last-child pseudo-class, but that doesn't appear in Acid2.

I suppose this is why they already designed Acid3. [webstandards.org] Hint: Firefox 2 scores 50/100.

Improved standards isn't the story here

[trepan]

The real story here is that "Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly."

If you've been following any of the design / developer blogs and community response about this, you'll know that in a previous plan [alistapart.com], all web pages would render in IE7 standards mode unless the developer inserted a specific meta tag

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

into each web page of a site. (For the truly avant garde, one could set the content to "edge", which would tell IE to render in the most current standards compliant version available). The outcry was that while it was clear that IE was making progress in standards, in order to take advantage of those improvements, developers were being asked to touch each page of their sites and tell IE to use its more standards compliant mode. That discussion is what was at play here.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Your.Master]

No, what they said was that they didn't necessarily have all standards met; but at no point did they say that they only fixed just enough to do Acid2.

Acid3

[drewness]

Just for fun I tried Acid3 with a couple browsers (all MacOS 10.4.11):
Firefox3 nightly from March 3rd: 66/100. (Second closest to the reference rendering.)
Safari 3.0.4: 39/100.
Opera 9.26: 46/100. (Looked the least like the reference rendering though.)
Webkit nightly from March 4th: 87/100. (It also looked the closest to the reference rendering.)

Re:+1 Informative

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

That's not quite true. Your moderations get erased if you post AC by checking the "Anonymous Coward" checkbox, but if you manually logout before posting, your mod points remain intact.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[BZ]

Sorry, but this is false. There's support for those, and has been for a good long time.

Re:/.: Giving proprietors a pass and vapor = real.

[Runefox]

Only one problem: IE is still the largest single share of the browser market, and likely will be by the time IE8 hits the market, which means people like me (web developers) and Joe Average (end users) are very interested in how it's going to turn out, even if I don't actually use IE for anything other than testing purposes. When IE has a viable competitor in the market share category, then the heat will be on and the focus will shift. For now, not enough people use Firefox or other browsers, though the shift is in progress.

Re:Improved standards isn't the story here

[WallyDrinkBeer]

No.

Old web pages will not have a DOCTYPE. If they don't have a DOCTYPE, IE 8 will render them using quirks mode. They will work exactly the same.

As a Web Developer, by including a strict doctype at the top of your current IE6/7 page, you are promising to be standards compliant. You shouldn't be ignoring standards and at the same time promising to browsers that you comply with standards.

If your strict IE6/7 junk doesn't render in IE8, then how is it currently working with firefox/opera etc.

If a developer cares so little about other browsers or doing things correctly, they deserve to have to update hundreds or web pages.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[mike_sucks]

You obviously missed the bit where I said "I can't run IE - it is not available for the operating systems I have available to me".

That aside, I think supporting an open web is worth it.

/Mike

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[edwdig]

Have you ever tried implementing something described in an RFC ?

When you get to the should / should not stuff, it comes down to in most cases you really want to listen to it, but there tend to be specific cases (say, embedded devices) where it really doesn't make sense to follow the normal behavior. Generally, if you run into one of those cases, it tends to be obvious that deviating from the spec is the right thing to do.

The optional and recommended stuff tends to be things that really depend on the specific product and shouldn't be forced.

Making things more strict would be a bad thing and make people break the standards more. The current setup acknowledges that different implementations have different needs and does a good job of accommodating.

Re:Improved standards isn't the story here

[jsoderba]

Look closer. The meta tag with http-equiv argument means that the browser should treat it as if it was an HTTP header field. You can accomplish the same effect by configuring the web server to include a "X-UA-Compatible: IE=7" header. On Apache it only takes a single line in the configuration file to add a static header to every page. I imagine the same is possible on IIS.

Re:I don't care about IE at all

[mike_sucks]

I can't legally run IE - I do not have copy of Windows and I do not agree with the shrink-wrap licence IE ships with.

Hence the fact that Wine runs it is moot.

/mike

Re:They also said Windows NT was POSIX compliant.

[jimicus]

AIUI Windows NT was POSIX compliant. But the POSIX specifications of the time left huge swathes of API defined where it was perfectly OK to return ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED.

None of the mainstream Unix vendors actually did this, so most Unix code was written on the assumption that very little was not implemented. Windows, OTOH, returned ERROR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED everywhere it could. With fairly predictable results.

Re:Improved standards isn't the story here

[Phroggy]

Yes, but the new way is just as idiotic: Every single existing web page that is who knows how old and currently IE6- and/or IE7-compatible will have to be updated with a meta tag telling IE8 that it should not render them in IE8 mode.

This is only true if 1) those old pages are currently rendering in standards mode (really old stuff designed for Netscape 4 will still render in Quirks mode and will therefore not be affected by this) and 2) the improved standards compliance of IE8's rendering engine actually breaks your site. Chances are, if your web site looks OK in Firefox, Opera and Safari, it will also look OK in IE8. On the other hand, if you actually meant for your page to look like this [inspirated.com], IE8 will cause a problem for you.

Note that this situation is slightly different from the problems people experienced when upgrading from IE6 to IE7. If your site looks correct in IE7 but is broken in IE8, all you have to do is add a simple META tag. Yes, it's more obnoxious in the short term than if IE7 compatibility were the default, but I really don't expect most sites to have a problem with it.

I really don't see people bothering and going and updating hundreds of thousands of existing web pages/sites. IE8 will break more web sites than it will 'fix'. No matter what Microsoft does, they just make things worse.

People have already had to update hundreds of thousands of existing web pages to get them to work in IE7. If they had any sense, they didn't just hack them to work exclusively in IE7; they updated the code to be standards-compliant so it renders correctly in IE7 and Firefox and Opera and Safari. IE8 getting even better standards support shouldn't break much.

Re:Huge assumption in the title

[Crayon Kid]

Did IE7 do anything right? No, really.

Come on, let's not be like that. I test my website layout in Opera and Firefox and then move on to IE to see what needs to be fixed so it looks as intended. With IE7 I rarely need to fix something, and it's usually minor. IE6 however is a completely different story and I never get away without a conditional comment introducing an extra stylesheet that picks up the pieces. So let's give credit where it's due: IE7 is a hell of a lot better than IE6 and I hope IE8 is even better than that.