Alex Shirley wrote
IE 8 brings new controversy by introducing this tag:
See:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype
... which makes a website targeted towards IE8 rendering (which makes it more standard compliant apparently). By default (correct me if I'm wrong) IE8 rendering is disabled by default within IE8 unless a site has that tag.
Personally I think this situation is crazy, MS should have just made this setting the default which would have forced "bad" designers to make their website more standards compliant. A major opportunity missed to do some clean up on the web. I guess MS didn't have the gut to do this.
Things may not be as bad as you think. First of all, as you know, your own site can chose the strictest compliance if you want. Also, depending on your site's <!DOCTYPE> IE8 may well be using IE8 standards mode (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817574.aspx). That's good enough for me. I don't really care about other sites working or not. While I'm no browser expert, I can't wish a browser away (I can curse it though). I simply make sure my site supports all browsers that I can reasonably expect to visit my site. IE8 gives me the tools to do so which is better than surprising me. Every browser has its quirks (I have already cursed Chrome quite a few times and everyone seems to have a love affair with it) and we just have to live with it/them.
Paul (we met in Orlando and had a chat about Circuit City), I feel your pain, but I don't want to tell my site's visitors to upgrade their browser. First off, most of them are developers choosing to stick with Windows XP (no, I don't want to start a Vista war as I'm using Vista x64 myself). But, there are compelling reasons to stick with XP for the type of development my customers/site visitors do. 80% of my visitors (excluding bots of course) use XP, some W2K and some Vista (the rest, who cares).
Just like McDonalds drive through isn't going to tell a Ford Excursion driver it's time to get a "greener" car, I don't think my visitors really care about making my job easier. Especially, when it comes to consumers (not power users), they may have bought their computers a year or two ago, maybe a slightly underpowered laptop with XP instead of Vista (you know, the "cheap" ones) and they would be deathly afraid to upgrade even their browsers. Actually, to some, when you talk about a "browser", they don't know what you are talking about, you have to call it Windows Explorer! I'm not kidding, I'm a developer myself and I have problems communicating with "mere mortals" quite often and "browser" versus "Internet Explorer" happens quite often.
So, I thank Microsoft for telling me exactly how IE8 works and I use that knowledge to support my new IE8 visitors (thanks DNN for IE8 slices!). And, I make sure I test my site on all supported browsers. Do I like to do this? No, I curse browsers every day, often more than once a day. But, it's a fact of life. Unfortunately, I have been around long enough to have seen the days of DOS - CP/M with applications that had to implement their own printer drivers because there was no operating system to do it for them. And, in a few years, someone will reminisce about the "browser war" and the incompatibilities and complain about some other problem du jour. It could be you. Until then, this is progress and we all pay for it (and most of us enjoy the ride).