Switching IE

Much has been made of the "IE Versioning Switch" proposal. Frankly, I find all the notoriety perplexing. It would appear that many Web standards advocates and others of interest are afraid that this new versioning switch is likely to be adopted by browser manufacturers other than Microsoft. Apple's Webkit team, at least, assures us that they have no such plans. It seems just as unlikely for Mozilla or Opera to adopt a versioning switch for the most of the same reasons, the biggest, I think, being a need for a much larger codebase.

Another thing to consider is that by adopting a versioning switch for IE, Microsoft is catering to a group of developers and users that don't want to upgrade. The folks who grumbled and complained to Microsoft when IE7 "broke the Web" (by rendering CSS better than IE6) should be embracing the thought that IE8 will be more standards compliant than any of its predecessors. For whatever reason, Microsoft has made a commitment to support backwards compatibility, and now must stand by it. None of the other browser vendors has to worry about it.

My only problem with Microsoft's implementation was brought up by Jeremy Keith. In theory one should be able to create a Web page in HTML, create the layout with CSS, and be able view it in any browser without making any browser-specific adjustments. This is the whole point behind standards. However, IE8 (and, presumably, its descendants) will be built to render a page the way IE7 does. In other words, all of the standards compliance features built into IE8 will be turned off by default unless a developer includes a tag that does nothing in any other browser! Either you have platform independent HTML or platform independent CSS, and that is unfortunate indeed.