Don’t fork the web, IE8 meta switch may get ugly
If you don’t already have your head around the recent articles regarding IE8 and its three rendering modes you should, it is going to be a fact of life soon.
Basically it comes down to IE rendering pages in three modes, the “old mode”, the IE7 half standards mode and IE8 full standards mode. It makes sense to be nice to the web developers who refuse to keep up with their profession, their pages will work forever in future version’s of IE, and be nice to the leading edge developers who painfully hack their way into IE.
As a web developer myself at first I did not have an opinion on the topic but the more I read the more scared I get. This is going to introduce yet ANOTHER variable into the development world. Making developers working on new projects forced to keep up with these three modes and possibly in three years still be working in the “old mode” when they could have been in full standards mode two years ago and help out the end user. Instead it is advocating laziness (ignorance) and old code on the web.
The web is an always transforming place, the landscape has changed from a page-to-page static world to a fully asynchronized ajax environment. These three modes will just slow down the advancements on the web and ultimately make the end user suffer. The graph included is wayne.edu’s IE usage IE7 has taken over IE6’s lead and 7’s growth continues to climb, browsers come and go and developers know this. Soon IE7 will be gone and IE8 will have the largest percent of Microsofts browser share.
Not to mention if no other browsers pick up the idea (I really hope they don’t), IE will yet again become the corporate browser of its predecessors and the “lock in” continues. IE’s goal should be to unify the web and if some sites get broken in the mean time so be it, if enough people like the features (forced update via windows update) and end up using IE8 the non-compliant companies will get on board the standards wagon and won’t look back, their business will depend on it.
My stance is firm, the meta rendering mode is a negative not only for the web development community but the web users as a whole. Breaking the already broken end of the web may not be a bad thing in the overall scheme, just imagine in two years or so when they eventually deprecate the “old mode” rendering engine, it’ll be a much tougher fight than if they never implemented it in the first place.
Update: 01/24/2008 6:30 am EST:
After reading an article by John Resig and the HTML 5 DOCTYPE my fears of this meta switch have eased. It turns out IE will only use the meta tag for doctypes which are already established and widely used. HTML5 and beyond will not need the switch to render in fully standard mode. And IE8 will support DOCTYPE switching for all new DOCTYPES.
This changes the whole situation, it awards the developers who code to standards with an actual useful browser and lets the lazy developers keep their routine.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:07 am
perhaps they could have a formal apology display in the IE toolbar - “if this site looks b0rked, we’re to blame. the designer is innocent of all crimes”
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
As a crotchety old curmudgeon who’s been building web sites since Nick was about 9 or 10 years old, I have only two thoughts:
First, I’m appalled that Nick (who also goes on about PHP and other such sensible things) would show a pie chart consisting *only* of traffic from IE6 and IE7. As he and I both know (and anyone else in the field *should* know), that’s ignoring all other versions of IE, plus all other browsers for Windows, plus *all* browsers for anything but Windows. How about a pie chart that shows IE6 and IE7 traffic as percentages of Wayne State’s total, Nick?
Second, “code to the standards and make sure it degrades gracefully on browsers that aren’t standards-compliant” doesn’t seem any worse an idea now than it was back in the mid-1990s. Seriously.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:13 am
From Dictionary.com:
cur·mudg·eon /kərˈmʌdʒən/ –noun
a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person.
Sounds like you used the right word.
Three points:
1) I’ve been building websites for about the same amount of time, but that doesn’t make either of us better web designers. Our talent, technical skills, and ability to keep up with the times is what makes a web designer better or worse. In my experience, people who use time as their measure of skill in any IT field have been unable to keep up in the industry. I know 60-year-olds that will kick the socks off most programmers even with the latest and greatest tech, and I know 13-year-olds that give them a run for their money. Age and time have nothing to do with skill.
2) That graph is perfectly appropriate for the point being made. Those are the two most popular versions of IE by far, and he was simply showing, as stated in the text, that IE7 is gaining popularity at the expense of the popularity of IE6. In that context, the graph says all it needs to say, and any other information in the graph would be superfluous.
3) Your second point has nothing to do with his argument. If everyone were to “code to the standards…”, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The point of the article is that a portion, perhaps a large one, of the web “population” are lazy coders, and this new split of rendering engines will simply coddle those users into continued, and perhaps worse, laziness. Yes, the good coders and designers “code to the standards…” but would you say they are the majority? If coders and designers were forced, however gently, to “code to the standards..” at the expense of their business, don’t you think more coders and designers would “code to the standards..”, therefore making the web a more standard, better functioning virtual place?
I’m probably a curmudgeon too, but I haven’t gotten crotchety yet…
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Standards, standards, standards. Whatever has to be done to get to there, then do it. Personally all my CSS is written as cross browser as it can be, and I just include a conditional CSS file especially for IE afterwards to put in the “hacks”. I can just as easily make this conditional ignore IE8 (already have it ignoring IE7 on most cases). Its going to be a little hectic at first but we must move forward at all costs. Until then just try to keep on top and for CSS, use the above method and it won’t be so painful when the world changes (and it always does)
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
FireFox FTW
January 23rd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
The graph may be appropriate for the point being made if the point is that “OMG there’s a new version of IE, and as usual, the new version behaves differently.”
But as I was trying to point out, it’s difficult to figure out how important the issue is unless we know what percentage of the site’s *total* traffic is represented by that pie chart. And stating percentages on the pie chart is likely to mislead.
I could do something similar showing Lynx 2.3 vs 2.4 usage on any one of my sites, and conveniently fail to mention that the two, combined, account for a fraction of one percent of my traffic.
Web designers who don’t (for whatever reason) just code to the standards tend to care about what browsers they’re actually getting traffic from. Choosing 2 versions of 1 browser that’s only available for 1 platform doesn’t really lead to informed decisions. With the growth of other browsers (notably Firefox) and platforms (Mac, Linux) that don’t run IE 6/7/8, each of the slices of the pie chart above probably accounts for less than 1/3 of the traffic to the site (just a wild guess, there).
The people who do conditional-everything for each browser will, alas, have more work. Condolences.
March 4th, 2008 at 6:47 am
[...] lazy developers I talked about before will have to update their skills or they will be out of a job. It will also [...]