Comments on: Internet Explorer 8 round-up

By: Rashid Z. Muhammad

Rashid Z. Muhammad — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:55:34 +0000

Compatibility vs. compliance is the classic trade off and Microsoft’s position has been the same for 30 years. So has Apple’s. And I have to say that breaking quicktime functionality in my $1000 copy of Final Cut Pro with a QT update that Apple kept bothering me to get (6.5 to 7.0) pisses me off a lot more than adding meta tags to my web apps.

This isn’t to take shots at Apple but just to say that, from my vantage point at least, this issue really is a catch 22 that will burn a ton of people either way.

By: tiffany

tiffany — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:44:06 +0000

I agree with you and Jeremy: it makes no sense to have opt-in to standards compliance. And as someone said (I think it was on van Kesteren’s post), everything is already broken because of IE’s special way of implementing stuff.

I think Microsoft has to go this route, though, because if a web site breaks, the user and developer will blame Microsoft instead of their own code.

For example, one of the big complaints I heard about Netscape 4 among those who preferred IE was that sites just “look right” and “work better” in IE 4 (or maybe it was IE 5). What those folks didn’t know was that the HTML was crap and IE handled crap code better.

Rather than risk being seen as a broken browser by folks who don’t know better (average web user, slack a** developers with old skills) and losing market share, MS is choosing to support bad code.

I think it’s smart for Microsoft’s business. It’s an intelligent way to make the best of a bad situation and maintain backwards compatibility.

That said, I’m annoyed about still having to do something special so that my sites still look and behave sensibly in a Microsoft browser — and not just behave sensibly, but behave as the specification(s) say they should. I think the execution of it sucks big fat donkey balls.

By: j. brotherlove

j. brotherlove — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:36:47 +0000

And where do you weigh in on the subject? The discussion (dare I say outcry) over IE8’s compatability is already making my head hurt. But I believe IE8 should render compliant IE8 “out the box”. Having to insert code to tell it to behave the way it was built to doesn’t even sound right. Then again, whichever way this goes, a bunch of sites will need tweaking.