IE8 Version Targeting
If you’re a web developer, I’m sure you’ve already heard about it…
If you haven’t, check out the original proposal on IE blog and the pretty much official announcement on A List Apart as well as Zeldman’s defense of the proposal.
I already wrote a lot about the subject in comments on those sites, especially on Zeldman’s blog where I tried to make him understand that the proposed default behavior of rendering as IE7 is a bad thing for Web Standards. I was sort of blunt about it and I think I’m on his black list now but… Ho well, I believe he’s flat out wrong on that one so I had no choice.
I think that Microsoft’s position makes perfect sense if you’re Microsoft, but it really doesn’t if you’re someone who’s supposed to be a Standards advocate. Even Eric Meyer, the CSS guru, who is sort of for the proposal says on his blog that he tried to convince Microsoft that the default behavior should be to render with what they call “edge” and not IE7.
Anyone defending this proposal in its original form is simply saying that Microsoft’s market share is more important than the future of the Web and Standards as a whole. You can wrap that up in sophistic pragmatism and euphemisms like “don’t brake the web” all you want, when it comes down to it, the whole thing is a “Microsoft only” solution to a “Microsoft only” problem.
Zeldman’s wrote this in the comments of his blog:
Firefox, Safari, and Opera don’t need a new switch but Microsoft does […] The need was discovered by Microsoft and not, say, Opera or Firefox, because nobody authors exclusively to the quirks of Opera’s browser or of Firefox.
Sure, that statement is true… But Zeldman conveniently forgets to mention that the reason why no one “authors exclusively to the quirks of Opera’s browser or of Firefox” is because those browsers don’t have quirks that need to be worked around.
This is only one of the numerous strangely one sided arguments you can find on his blog. If I didn’t know his track record better, I would think that he’s purposefully trying to deceive people to push Microsoft’s agenda, but since I know his track record, I’m assuming he must have another reason to defend this undefendable position.
I just can’t figure out what the reason could be. It’s baffling, and very disappointing…
Comments on this article
Howdy.
I think that the people for the proposal are aware that it is something intended to benefit Microsoft, but that it carries the secondary benefit of making standards-based development more of a possibility in future IE releases.
Of course, the debate for most is not about the usefulness of version targeting, but rather who should have to add the new element to their pages.
Again, Microsoft’s proposed default is for the benefit of Microsoft, but I don’t think it should be hard to see why they would do it: after the IE7 debacle, they don’t want to have to deal with the slew of complaints from large corporate customers about how their sites have “broken.”
Someone in the discussion has said that it’s ridiculous for these large corporate customers to implement a new browser without testing it first, but I don’t think that’s the problem. I don’t think these corporate customers have implemented IE7 (I’ve heard that most haven’t, and I know for a fact that Bank of America hasn’t); rather, they were probably looking forward to significant security and scripting updates in the next IE, and were angered when they were given a browser that they couldn’t use without significant updates to their existing sites.
I know that many independent standardistas would simply say that the corporations should update their websites to be standards-compliant, and I agree to an extent, but most overlook the way things run at a large corporation. Business goals are established independently of Microsoft’s release schedule, and there can be no impromptu project when a browser is released.
Most would agree that Microsoft and the way it does things sucks. But if there is an IE for the next ten years, it will likely continue to be the dominant browser. The IE team is trying to find a way to please the group that will make the largest financial impact on Microsoft, because a corporation that does otherwise will anger its shareholders. Unfortunately for the many developers who’d rather not have to “opt-in,” that means setting the default in favor of corporations that, despite not supporting the standards that so many are passionate about, are still getting the job done for their shareholders with their current setups, and who need more convincing evidence than has been given to start a large scale project to completely revamp their intranets.
Brian Warshaw, on 2008.03.02
It seems that we agree on mostly everything. My main point though is that Standards advocates like Zeldman don’t work for Microsoft and therefor their position on the subject is baffling.
Yann, on 2008.03.03
IE is only dominant AND broke because people continue to waste money writing kludges for them. If the kludges stop, then either the dominance will stop or ‘the broke’ will stop.
My wife has to use a web-based worksite that is so crummy that it calls for ONLY Win98 and ONLY MSIE 5. Why? Because some dummy wrote a site to browser sniff as if those were the last versions of both the OS and the browser.
IMHO, the only websites that need to support IE are the Firefox and Opera download pages. Oh, and maybe the Safari download page, too.
Bill Canaday, on 2008.03.24