Standards Solution to Microsoft's IE8 Version-Targeting Rubbish

Bevan Rudge

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February 20, 2008

Standards Solution to Microsoft's IE8 Version-Targeting Rubbish

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It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8:
"John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode. "John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ . "Then, and perhaps more excitingly, he examines how HTML 5 support could be backported (admittedly with JavaScript) to older IE versions: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/ . "I think both are worth a read, and should perhaps give us standaristas some hope.
Thanks Steven 'Sven' Merrill for his comment yesterday.

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smerrill February 25, 2008
Bevan, Another item you should check out re: IE8 and its behavior is this roundtable with WaSP members and Chris Wilson, platform architect for IE8. Some interesting points that I think came out of it:
  1. It may be IE8's new JS engine that Microsoft are more worried about than CSS, so that sites that require JS / do not use progressive enhancement will not break. (getElementById() used to search not just HTML IDs, but also NAME attributes.)
  2. One suggestion made was to make strict DOCTYPEs not trigger the default behavior.
  3. It looks like IE8 will have a user-accessible switch for "edge mode."
  4. The other big question that is still on the table is if IE8 will only respond to IE8 conditional comments, or if in IE7 mode it will also respond to IE7 conditional comments. Same question with how the User-Agent string will be handled.
It's worth a listen or a read.