Anigozanthos

The news that IE8 specially configures intranet pages to display in a compatibility mode is no surprise to me.

I blogged about Microsoft's compatibility problem several months ago, and decided that they needed two browsers - one for private intranets and one for the public Internet. All Microsoft have done here is roll all that into a single browser.

Håkon is wrong to complain about that. Microsoft have no choice unless they don't want any of their corporate customers to upgrade to IE8. How would that help improve web standards? No, the best way to improve web standards is to allow private sites backward compatibility, while allowing public sites to default to web standards. That will allow the maximum number of users to upgrade to the vastly more standards-compliant IE8, which in spite of how a lot of people feel, will eventually become the most widely-used browser.

Håkon is not wrong to complain about the broken page icon. Icons in status bars are usually there to draw your attention to them, indicating something important or a potential problem. From a users point of view, being in standards compliant mode is neither. All users care about is if the page looks and works OK. Web developers will ensure that will be true for their IE visitors. It is absolutely wrong to associate a broken page icon with standards compliant web pages and rendering modes.

What would be useful is an icon to indicate whenever the browser has had to guess how to handle broken page code - typically invalid HTML or CSS. Browsers should never have to guess. If they do, then web developers are relying on luck for correct display. Developers should want something more reliable than that, and their users certainly do!

That's really what everyone wants. That every web page should just work. No buttons, no icons, no special rendering modes (it's OK if the different modes are hidden, as they are now). Everyone agreeing to and using the same standard is the only way to get there.