MS version targeting? Ohmygod.
Wednesday, 23. January 2008, 10:37:37
I think this has been covered to death already on the web, by designers and developers much more knowledgeable on these matters than myself. But I still felt compelled to blog about it, and give my own perspective.
Microsoft have decided to try to save themselves the shame of breaking the web any more by introducing version targeting to web pages, that is, you can now add a <META> element to your document's <head>, to specify which IE rendering engine your markup/code should be rendered by. The element will look something like this:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
Aaron wrote about it first here.
It might sound like a good idea at first - people who care about web standards can get IE to render their pages using the latest version, while those of you who don't give a rat's ass about standards (sadly still too many of you) can tell it to use an older version of the IE rendering engine, so that the page will still work in your user's browsers (most of whom will use IE 6 or 7 because of ignorance coupled with monopolist tactics.) All you care about is your users not complaining and you getting paid, right? Fair enough, I can see the logic there.
There are however, numerous issues that I (and others) can see; the ones that particularly jumped out at me are as follows:
1. It doesn't seem to bode well for teaching people to embrace web standards. In fact, it could mean that the ignorant masses, who get their sites to work in IE, and perhaps Firefox if you're lucky, can continue to get away with a lot of the crap they've done for years, and just don't need to bother doing anything else...
2. It is like a soggy bandaid on a gaping wound. As Ethan said so succinctly:
3. Surely it absolves MS of all responsibility for implementing standards properly, because they can just use version targetting to cover up the mistakes that old versions of IE have left (and will leave) behind on the web?
4. It will bloat IE considerably, if they have to implement multiple rendering engines in each new version? Sounds like a pretty crazy way to write software to me.
5. The fact that if you don't include the <META> element, the default rendering engine is IE7 ... seems like totally the wrong way to do it. Surely the default should just be the latest version of the IE rendering engine? As Jeremy said very well:
The quote that really amuses me is Aaron's final line from the ALA article -
Or we could just implement the standards properly in the first place ... oooh, we have. Get real.
There are some other good posts available on the subject from Anne van Kesteren, Roger Johannson, John Resig, and Andy Budd.
Microsoft have decided to try to save themselves the shame of breaking the web any more by introducing version targeting to web pages, that is, you can now add a <META> element to your document's <head>, to specify which IE rendering engine your markup/code should be rendered by. The element will look something like this:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
Aaron wrote about it first here.
It might sound like a good idea at first - people who care about web standards can get IE to render their pages using the latest version, while those of you who don't give a rat's ass about standards (sadly still too many of you) can tell it to use an older version of the IE rendering engine, so that the page will still work in your user's browsers (most of whom will use IE 6 or 7 because of ignorance coupled with monopolist tactics.) All you care about is your users not complaining and you getting paid, right? Fair enough, I can see the logic there.
There are however, numerous issues that I (and others) can see; the ones that particularly jumped out at me are as follows:
1. It doesn't seem to bode well for teaching people to embrace web standards. In fact, it could mean that the ignorant masses, who get their sites to work in IE, and perhaps Firefox if you're lucky, can continue to get away with a lot of the crap they've done for years, and just don't need to bother doing anything else...
2. It is like a soggy bandaid on a gaping wound. As Ethan said so succinctly:
The burden is upon developers and designers to comply, test, and validate. As it stands, version targeting won’t improve the quality of our code, or improve the current state of future proofing. Rather, it’s a software patch intended to fix broken human behavior. We need to fix the problem at hand, and a new meta element isn’t the answer.
3. Surely it absolves MS of all responsibility for implementing standards properly, because they can just use version targetting to cover up the mistakes that old versions of IE have left (and will leave) behind on the web?
4. It will bloat IE considerably, if they have to implement multiple rendering engines in each new version? Sounds like a pretty crazy way to write software to me.
5. The fact that if you don't include the <META> element, the default rendering engine is IE7 ... seems like totally the wrong way to do it. Surely the default should just be the latest version of the IE rendering engine? As Jeremy said very well:
Unless you explicitly declare that you want IE8 to behave as IE8, it will behave as IE7. That’s madness! If I don’t use the X-UA-Compatible instruction, I won’t get the benefit of any future improvements in Internet Explorer. That sounds like blackmail to me.
The quote that really amuses me is Aaron's final line from the ALA article -
I, for one, hope other browser vendors join Microsoft in implementing this functionality.
Or we could just implement the standards properly in the first place ... oooh, we have. Get real.
There are some other good posts available on the subject from Anne van Kesteren, Roger Johannson, John Resig, and Andy Budd.
WIDGETIZE