Tim Almond

This week, Microsoft announced a new feature that’s going into IE8, which seems to be causing a stir amongst web developers.

The idea is that by putting in a meta tag on an HTML page, you can tell it which version of Internet Explorer you’d like it to be rendered like (or by not putting it in at all, it will get rendered as if IE7).

The benefit of such an approach is that someone can design their site, test it out in IE7 and then write a meta tag saying:-

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

and regardless of whether the user is running Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8, it will get rendered the same.

I’m puzzled why developers have a problem with this. It gives developers the opportunity to plan in when they’re going to check the site for IE8. They don’t have to immediately go through a testing program - they can leave the site as IE7 compatibility until such time that they are in a good position to do IE8. In the meantime, the early adopters of IE8 aren’t going to get a bad experience just because they chose to upgrade their browsers.

It’s also not a “Microsoft is being evil”. The tag is designed around supporting any other browser that wants to go along with the same approach.

Tags: Software Development, Technology, Internet //