I’ve previously argued about the X-UA-Compatible issue. I withhold that using the old IE7 Standards mode per default is the best Microsoft could have done for web compatibility. However, it’s not the best they could do for compliancy to the web standards or for interoperability with other browsers. Microsoft recently announced the Microsoft Interoperability Principles and as a result of this change in principles, the IE team announced in IEBlog: Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 that they are changing the default behaviour of IE8 Standards mode to the best standards they can give. With this change sites with a Standards Mode triggering DOCTYPE are per default given the IE8 rendering, with the ability to request IE7 Standards mode in the same way they were originally intending to trigger IE8 mode.

I’m a bit split over this decision. On one hand it WILL break more current sites than the original idea would have done. On the other hand, new content or content that does not give different scripts paths or style filters to IE will be given a better rendering mode. And it will be more in line with the Standards Mode those sites are given in Opera, Mozilla and Safari.

Posted in Blog |

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