“The endless hand-wringing over browser version targeting in IE8 illustrates what’s wrong with the web standards community.” - You

What, exactly, is wrong with the standards community? Microsoft, a corporation who’s actions reverberate loudly throughout the online community and inevitably impact every facet of a developer’s daily life is proposing a solution to a problem which will effect a *huge* majority of the development community. It is incredibly important that people have an opinion and make there voices heard (as you have in your post). Some people may “squable” over certain technicalities, but if they don’t then who will? You? Nope

“…A List Apart - the standard-bearer of web standards…” - You

Sorry, “standard-bearer of web standards” = http://w3.org

“…First, a little background: Howls of protest echoed…” - You

Sounds like there’s an opinion on whether the meta tags are a good idea or not buried in there… Also, people weren’t howling, they were expressing there opinion just like you are now

“…Basically, from IE8, onward, Explorer will include multiple rendering engines and display individual pages based on the browser version targeted by this new meta tag…”

Hence the debate, or as you call it “endless hand-wringing”; Is there a need to include a meta tag for any other browser in order to render a document correctly? Should there be? Should we just write gracefully degrading markup and CSS? Should we just use the standard doctypes and deal with the rendering problems as we have in the past (hacks/conditional comments/browser sniffing/etc)? Whichever you vote for doesn’t concern me much, but the fact that you are a self proclaimed website developer who is essentially “dissing” the development community because they are contributing there opinions in an attempt to better the future of web development while touting the following paradigm:

“What I want to know is this: Will Microsoft’s move make my job as a web developer easier or harder?”

… is what pushes my buttons the most. I would say thank you for your “Howls of protest” over the way the development community has reacted to the proposed small and subtle changes that WASP and Microsoft have proposed. We appreciate your strong and unwavering opinion and participation in the web development community. Your understanding of the standards process and how it affects all tiers of the online community makes you… Whatever, you get my point.

Wasting my breath,

Good post though, fortified my position regarding so-called web developers who don’t have opinions on developments that have large repercussions on the web development community so long as it makes things easier for them

Correct, but not for the reason you think.

Standards-compliant browsers now have a big enough market share that they can no longer be ignored by developers. In Europe alone, Firefox has a 28% market share. Therefore, developers have to design their pages to conform to standards to get the best, most reliable rendering in these browsers.

Internet Explorer 7 as well cannot be ignored. Heck, we can’t even ignore IE6 yet. Therefore, we must continue to design web pages to have a gracefully degraded fallback on IE7.

But that’s not the case with IE8. So long as we use a known, non-HTML5 doctype, it will (supposedly) render any page like IE7. Thus, once I’ve designed a standards-compliant HTML 4.01 page with conditional HTML and CSS tweaks for IE7, I’m done. I don’t have to change my development model at all.

@Brian Dillard: “[...] even the best browsers’ WC3 implementations are incomplete and buggy [...]“

All major non-IE browsers render standards-compliant pages almost identically. I personally test my pages in Mozilla Firefox, then Opera, then Safari, and finally Internet Explorer. Once I’ve developed the initial layout in Firefox, it only takes at most few minutes to tweak it for Opera, and then I always get Safari for free after that. But when I get to Internet Explorer, I spend several hours reworking the site to render properly. I’ve actually run into a situation where I had to introduce frames into a frameless layout solely to get it to render properly in IE.

To be fair, there are a few edge cases where standards could be better supported across competing browsers. (In some cases, the specified behavior is universally deemed impractical by all vendors.) However, it’s misleading to suggest that, because browsers which support the vast majority of today’s Web standards don’t support them _perfectly_, we should excuse a browser that only supports about 60% to 70% of those same standards. There’s a difference between approaching a law of diminishing returns in your standards implementation and resting on the laurels of your market share.

As for “buggy”, I don’t think recent release versions of most browsers have any significant stability problems. Updates to browsers that break existing standards-compliant content are the exception, not the rule, and new releases by contrast usually fix pages that were broken in previous versions rather than the other way around. In fact, Microsoft’s competition not only tend to have few security-related bugs for their browsers, but they usually have less severe security flaws that are patched faster.

@Brian Dillard: “Just as blind adherence to the AP stylebook encourages copy that’s poorly written in a perfectly uniform way, blind adherence to web standards encourages a schematic checklist of development practices that may or may not be appropriate to the project at hand.”

I’d say there’s a world of difference between blindly violating established conventions and standards and deliberately breaking with those standards to achieve a specific effect. There are situations where you might need to deviate from a standard.(For instance, if I include the |autocomplete| attribute in a login page, my page may not validate, but I may put it in anyways due to security concerns.) However, this does not excuse people from ignoring best practices and standards for convenience sake. Ideas such as separation of semantic content, presentation and behavior are designed to save time in the long run, and ignoring them for short-term benefit usually ends up costing you later.

@Brian Dillard: “With browser vendors tripping all over themselves to implement draft modules from the CSS3, HTML5 and XHTML2 specifications, the first wave of web standards is drawing to a close. We no longer have the holy gospel of finalized, well-established specs to buttress our neo-theological arguments.”

This is mainly standards-supporter-basing FUD. Let’s take CSS first. Most new CSS properties in non-IE browsers are first implemented as experimental vendor extensions (such as “-webkit-border-radius” and and “-moz-border-radius”), then implemented under their proper names once the spec reaches maturity. This simple practice would allow Microsoft to implement CSS3 experimentally first, then properly later, without breaking compatibility with existing pages.

Note that most web developers would be ecstatic if Microsoft just implemented CSS 2.1 in IE8, so CSS3 is very cart-before-the-horse. In fact, CSS Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) is a rewrite of CSS 2.0 to reflect how CSS 2 was actually supported in browsers (including Internet Explorer), so Microsoft will have little more to do than emulate the existing support of their competition.

Most of HTML5 is actually dedicated to documenting the _existing_ behavior of various browsers, including IE. What new elements it does introduce are either well supported in non-IE browsers or have well-understood presentations. Unlike HTML 4.01, HTML5 is much more detailed on how a browser is to handle various elements, and is specifically designed to be used as a reference for implementing new browsers. Furthermore, HTML5 was designed from the very beginning to gracefully degrade when viewed in legacy browsers, thus minimizing breakage. In other words, HTML5 was designed from the ground up to be implementable by Microsoft. The HTML WG even has Chris Wilson as a co-chair.

As for XHTML 2, Microsoft would have to support XHTML 1.0 first, so it’s a red herring.

@Brian Dillard: “Rather then measure virtue by our adherence to abstract ideals, we should look at emerging standards - both official and de facto - with a practical rather than a spiritual eye.”

We’re talking about extra work, disk space and bandwidth purely to get a (hopefully) standards-compliant rendering of what was supposed to be a standards-compliant page in the first place. Granted, there’s a lot of IE-specific content out there, but there are better ways of handling the situation. For instance, they could have limited the default IE7 rendering behavior to Quirks Mode and Limited Quirks Mode (”Almost Standards Mode”). This alone would catch the vast majority of IE-specific content without forcing most standards-compliant pages into a lesser rendering mode.

Another way to handle it would be to restrict the IE7-by-default behavior to specific zones such as “Local intranet”.

At this point, though, I really don’t care if it defaults to IE7 rendering. It’s looking more and more like IE8 will disappoint when it comes to standards compliance, so I’d rather have my content render in a legacy IE rendering mode than waste my valuable time supporting yet another substandard rendering mode that will be obsolete when the next version comes out.

Good blog by the way. I’m a regular reader.

Uhh… what were the choices again? “Yes” easier, or “yes” harder?