May 28, 2008 at 7:24 am · Filed under Plain Evil, Stick It To IE
“We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.” Yeah, like this happened with IE7 who still trails behind IE6, unless of course they forced the update on everybody in which case: “a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8.”
Wow Microsoft, like I didn’t waste enough time to make my websites work in your stupid browsers, now I have to go back to all of them so I can make them work in your stupid IE8 release?
Seriously, I don’t think so. Maybe the ” ideal of write once, run anywhere” should’ve been considered early in the game? Some time between IE5 and IE6.
February 17, 2008 at 9:36 am · Filed under General, Stick It To IE
Microsoft has done it again (technically they haven’t done it yet but they will with IE8). Microsoft has, again, invented new tags for their browser. On this occasion I’m only going to talk about the META tag developers will need to use to let IE8 know that it should render the page under IE8 standards.
So what is this META tag anyways and what does it do? To make put really simple, it tells IE how to render a website, as IE7 or as the more standard compliant IE8. At first you may seem confused as in why would you need to tell the browser which version to use. After all, a browser should be complaint from the beginning or at lest offer backward compatibility meaning that it should understand the hacks you had to use to make it work in it’s previous version.
But what’s really baffling is that IE8 is setting a precedent that may become a nightmare for web developers as new versions are created. According to this article Microsoft may be thinking that by letting developers choose which version their pages will render, it will assure that their websites won’t break on newer versions. But, why should a new browser version break a website that is already working? If you are IE, the answer is simple: Complete disregard for Web Standards.
So the point we are trying to make here is that the META tag approach is the wrong approach and it should be seen as another attempt by Microsoft into doing whatever they want and bullying everybody else into following. For starters, if they had committed to develop a standard compliant browser from the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
