Tim Almond

Some time ago, I wrote a post about version targetting in IE8, and how Microsoft were getting a beating from the standards people about the X-UA-Compatible tag, and how I personally thought they were wrong.

Well, turns out that Microsoft have listened to them and changed it so that it’s now “render this site in IE8″ by default. The result? Here’s Joel Spolsky:-

Almost every web site I visited with IE8 is broken in some way. Websites that use a lot of JavaScript are generally completely dead. A lot of pages simply have visual problems: things in the wrong place, popup menus that pop under, mysterious scrollbars in the middle. Some sites have more subtle problems: they look ok but as you go further you find that critical form won’t submit or leads to a blank page.

Now, no-one is saying that IE7 was right. It wasn’t. But the point is there are sites out there crafted for it.

The problem with the “this will render in IE8″ approach is that it’s impractical and expensive. Changing code is a little like digging up the road for gas, electricity and cable - if you can do all 3 together, it’s cheaper than doing them individually.

The “render as IE7″ approach meant that companies could wait, leave their sites rendering as IE7 until an another change came along (such as a redesign). Then, they could combine the testing of the redesign with testing it for IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari and whatever else.

Tags: Technology, Internet, Microsoft //