Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.   - Albert Einstein From the IE Blog : "We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously." The Explanation They are saying that thinking about IE8’s behavior with their published interoperability principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do. And more: "this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue ". In other words, instead of the various quirks mode flags and what-not, we'd rather not get sued, so we'll just default to the best standards compliance we can provide. "Quirks Mode" describes how modern browsers (like IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) all have different modes for interpreting the content of a web page: Quirks and Standards.  Basically, all the browser...

With Beta 1 targeted for first half 2008, the folks at Microsoft are now saying that as of last week, IE8 reached a core milestone: IE8 in standards mode now correctly renders the “ Acid2 Browser Test ”. Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards. I posted about this earlier, mentioning that not even the current edition of Firefox handles the acid2 test correctly. Of course I was quickly reminded by commenters that it did a much better job than IE7, and that's true. But the best news (besides the obvious fact that Microsoft embraces and sees the need for standards) is that they are going to do it in a way that doesn't "break" existing pages written for IE5 or IE6, or for the standards mode of other browser brands: Modern browsers typically have two modes to render web pages, “quirks” and “standards.” MS says their experience with releasing IE7 taught them that many web sites today expect the browser to have IE6-compat...

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear. - Dick Cavett I am really getting tired of seeing all these "holier than thou" articles, comments and rants about how Internet Explorer sucks because it doesn't implement "web standards" correctly, and how Firefox "does". Bottom line? A bunch of BS! Neither one does! Here are a few images from the ACID 2 Test which deliberately invokes invalid CSS to see how browsers handle it: IE TEST: FIREFOX TEST: REFERENCE IMAGE: Bottom line? Users need to quit their political, opinionated rants and work to ensure that browser manufacturers all work together so that there is seamless, consistent behavior across browser brands - whether it be rendering, Javascript, CSS, the DOM, or whatever. Standards take time to create, and a lot of thought goes into it. The standards are there for a reason. Let's stop the BS. Browser manufacturers and users all need to stop attacking each other and ...