A post every developer should read about IE 8
Joel has written a fantastic post about web standards and IE 8. Really, read this if you write code and really, really read it if you build websites:
Standards are a great goal, of course, but before you become a standards fanatic you have to understand that due to the failings of human beings, standards are sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes confusing and even ambiguous.
The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard: it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.
DOCTYPE is a myth.
A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There is no way they know that. All they are really saying is that the page was meant to be standard HTML. All they really know is that they tested it with IE, Firefox, maybe Opera and Safari, and it seems to work. Or, they copied the DOCTYPE tag out of a book and don’t know what it means.
In the real world where people are imperfect, you can’t have a standard with just a spec–you must have a super-strict reference implementation, and everybody has to test against the reference implementation. Otherwise you get 17 different “standards” and you might as well not have one at all.
Oooh, more interesting stuff about what is a really important topic. I reckon, though, that people are all getting a bit worked up about it at that site.
Clearly there’s a lot of interest on both sides of this debate and I don’t know who’s right. I really do like programming for standards based browsers and I’m fed up with dealing with IE6 and IE7 but they’re still kinda important.
My ideal would be for IE 8 to just work like FX and Safari by default and then I can hack in fixes for IE6 and IE7.
That’s pretty easy to grasp.
Now, what if I had to go back and de-hack each page I’d written for each client to date to make it work for IE8? That would kinda suck.
Keen to see what happens in practice. It is good to hear the MS is trying to build a compliant browser.
More at ALA about how the opt-in to standards was going to work prior to MS deciding to default to supporting standards
What a tangled web we weave.
Heh, Mark Pilgrim fisks Joel’s article:
You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out.
This self-fulfilling prophecy has been brought to you by Google Adsense: funding Slashdot trolls since 2003.
Those documents are super confusing.
Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, “Standards are tough! Let’s go shopping!”
The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard.
I have never heard of test suites.
98% of the world will install IE8
I am high as a kite.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:16 am
My initial reaction to the IE “almost standards mode” was the same as your point re: going back to “de-hack” pages you’d written for IE6 and 7.
The problem is though, where do we draw a line? Hacking around browser-specific problems is far from ideal or practical. We need to be able to move forwards here.
Joel’s deliberately provocative piece is simply ignorant. Coding to standards is not some mystical black art. It simply means “when I write some HTML code it will look the same in every browser”. It is also not very difficult to make sure you are confirming to the DOCTYPE you specify. His post is just full of bullshit, to be frank.
Anyway it is good to see debate about this, but I think most people want the least work and the most interoperability, and I don’t think writing 50 page long essays about stereo jacks and how standards are impossible to work with (interspersed with the odd sexist comment) is the way forwards.