Oddly Zen

Microsoft set to Play Nicely with Web Standards in Internet Explorer 8

Is the crew in Redmond finally on the bandwagon? It looks like IE8 will pass the Acid test.

The reality of Microsoft finally embracing standards could greatly simplify Web development because the need to inject workarounds and hacks to accommodate another noncompliant browser (like all current and previous versions of Internet Explorer) would vanish. You would still have to include code for older browsers, but things would be cleaner as the latest market share of Internet Explorer 8 grows and more users adopt it.

—Tony Patton, TechRepublic

If Microsoft does make IE8 pass the test, it is more than I can say about the latest release of Firefox. I just tested my browser and it is noncompliant. Sad, really.

As a web application developer, it is one of the nightmares I have to deal with — and if you work with CSS and web design/development, you know the deal. Putting in conditional CSS includes, special hacks for IE, the endless morass of tweaked code, just so pixel-perfect display is achieved… It is daunting and frankly unnecessary, considering we have standards for this stuff. While my opinion on standards in general is on-the-fence (due to the balance between stifling innovation and creating a hell like what we deal with due to browsers), web standards seem to me to be a necessary evil. It is simply our attempt to ‘language’ our communication on the web. It is a contract between developer and client, saying, ‘Okay, here is code we both agree upon — how it should look, taste, smell. No go render it.’ But, it invariably ends up garbled due to a proprietary implementation of some obscure thingamajig that Corporation X or Foundation Y thought the world could not live without.

Maybe this is a step toward that Utopian dream of seeing a web with standards, a web we can all surf and agree upon how it should look and behave. But I won’t get my hopes up — just yet, at least.