MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

With details of Internet Explorer 8 starting to trickle out, one of the key decisions that will impact all of us good and bad will be the decision to default IE to interpret web pages in the most standard complaint way.

For years now, we all have grown used to quirks mode and other tricks to squeeze things together to look just right in each browser.  In some ways this is like all currency going to the Euro or the US $ - in theory we would no longer have to write multi currency systems, in browser terms we could stop trying to tweak for each browser.  In concept a great idea....probably long overdue. 

I've said for a long time browsers should compete on added functions not the basic functions those should be standard.  What makes a standard could be a good discussion , one could argue the standard is what IE had been doing based on usage.

You can read the full announcement here on the IE Blog.

At this point , I have more questions than answers and no doubt will get to have some good energized discussions with others on the impact @ Mix

I suspect in the short term this will create haves and have nots as sites update to support IE8 and then there's those sites that nobody runs and will never look good on IE8.

IE8 will support recognition that the site wants to be rendered as IE7 standards mode if the site explicitly indicates using the meta tags described here.

So what's your take are we moving towards the Wild West or the WideOpen Web?