Microsoft’s IE8 Provides Opt-In Standards Compliance for Developers

Just read an article by Matthew Magain on Sitepoint that’s talking about the new opt-in meta tag function being developed by Microsoft for release in IE8.

You may or may not have heard about IE8 passing the ACID2 test. Which I think should have been good news right? But it’s never enough for Microsoft, or more accurately, those who are always looking for something to pick on Microsoft for in their methods.

I develop a lot of web pages and sadly I’m probably not as earnest about making sure everything is compliant as I should be. I rely on the software I’m using to write compliant code based on acceptable standards. I set my bug tracking and quality control requirements to high standards and then let it go from there.

With all that being sad, I’m by no means your hard-core, professional hand-coding web developer.

By requiring developers to declare when they want new browser rendering engines to kick in, Microsoft hopes to eliminate the kinds of page layout issues that plagued the release of IE7. From now on, if you write a page for a particular version of IE, it should work in all future versions of IE.

That’s just makes sense to me.

From my perspective though, I don’t know what the problem is with Microsoft providing the ability for developers to specifically mold their websites to IE8 standards as an option. For all you hard-hand-coders, if you want the ultimate in standards compliance go for it.

For the billions of other web pages out there that don’t specifically opt-in, they’ll still be rendered in IE7 as the lowest common denominator. Unless I’m reading it incorrectly, that means that nothing breaks for all those sites with the release of IE8 and ongoing usage by consumers.

If I’m getting the details of this wrong, can someone please clear this up for me?