Microsoft finally decides 'web standards' important for IE8

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 05 March 2008 07:52

Opinion and Analysis

After years of ‘embracing and extending’ existing standards to morph them into proprietary Microsoft standards, something strange is happening: Microsoft will ensure IE8 renders web content to accepted web standards – by default.

Someone’s put something into the water at Microsoft that’s suddenly caused the company to decide that following standards might just well be the right thing to do, not only for Microsoft, but the rest of the community.

Over at the IE blog, where Dean Hachamovitch, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer division, has given more details of why Microsoft has made the switch, a number of commenters have noted their ‘pleasant surprise’ with one even going so far as saying the decision had ‘made his day’.

Microsoft says in an official statement at their site that the company was using the “new approach to make standards-based rendering the default mode in Internet Explorer 8”, and would work “with Web designers and content developers to help with standards behaviour transition”, giving those standards ‘top priority’ for ‘interoperability’.

Microsoft noted that its previous behaviour in using Internet Explorer to create new standards over the years has caused web browsers to “include multiple content-rendering modes”.

These modes were used to support “strict interpretation of certain Web standards and also supporting behaviours designed to maintain compatibility with existing Web sites” – existing sites using the ‘new’ standards that browsers such as IE6 foisted onto the world.

Because of this, Microsoft says that “Web site designers generally have the ability to specify which mode they are designing for; in the absence of specific instructions from a Web site, browsers are pre-set to use one of the modes by default”.

But this all now changes with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). It now has three rendering modes, with Microsoft explaining that “one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of IE7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web”.

What is of interest is the “newest rendering mode”, which is “forward-looking and preferred by Web designers”, obviously because they are the official W3C standard, “while the others are present to enable compatibility with the myriad sites across the Web that are currently optimised for previous versions of Internet Explorer” – optimised because Microsoft forced designers to use their standards so that content would work on Internet Explorer, still the most popular browser despite the ever increasing market-share advance of Firefox, and other browsers such as Opera, Maxthon, Safari and others.

So, what does Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s ‘Chief Software Architect’ have to say about the sudden standards backflip switch? Please read onto page 2.