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Sunday, 10th February 2008, No Comments »

IE8 ‘compatibility’ render freezer

I respect Chris Wilson’s rule Don’t break the web, it’s an admirable and important goal, not just for the IE team, but all browser vendors, web designers and developers. However, I get the feeling this isn’t about the web you and I think about, it’s “Microsoft’s web” that has forced this rendering decision:

The people who would pay the second round of costs would be the tool makers, because all the content their tools generated to work in IE may or may not work anymore;
Chris Wilson’s comment at Molly’s blog

Microsoft’s web

Microsoft’s web is entirely based on .NET. As of .NET 2.0, by default, it will output XHTML, however there’s a bug (or a feature) that it will only output XHTML (so no building a kick arse site in HTML 3.2 then). And as we all know implementing ‘correct’ XHTML has it’s perils and not for the faint of heart, on top of that we’ve got IE’s complete lack of support for application/xhtml+xml.

So say the IE team decides to implement application/xhtml+xml in IE8 (lets pretend the IIS team agree, and do the same in the latest version). The compatibility of IE8 with Microsoft’s own products like OWA, Sharepoint, CRM and the hundreds of custom developed web applications is now up for grabs. What happens at those customer sites that are running the latest verson of IIS and IE, but only Exchange 2003, will OWA still work in IE8?

From memory the majority of the Microsoft’s own applications use the javascript function document.write(), which of course will not work at all in correctly served XHTML.

So does this all mean I agree with Microsoft’s desicion? Nope, not even close. I honestly think it’s the dumbest thing since coloured scrollbars, and makes the “we passed the Acid2 test announcement” basically a lie. Do I think there are better ways to handle this? Absolutely, and I’d share a few, but because of internal political matters at Microsoft I believe it will not get listened to and we are not going to get what’s best of the majority of professional web designers, developers and our customers. If I felt we, as web professionals, could do something about it I’d be 100% behind it, but there sadly isn’t.

Anyway, see ya at webstock.