There is a God: IE 8 Set to Comply with Standards (Wednesday, March 05, 2008 10:45:00 PM)
I have no idea what's gotten into Microsoft lately (perhaps the giant EU suit?), but this whole "We Care About Standards" thing is just fine with me. The company
recently announced in the IE Blog that IE 8 will no longer default to "quirks mode" and will instead default to standards mode.
The beta version of IE 8 is now available for developers at MSDNAs I understand it, "quirks mode" is a mode that helps render non-standard webpages that were written for older, pre-standards browsers. For example, if a page had been written to IE 6 and then displayed in IE 7, IE 7 in quirks mode would be better than viewing it in IE 7 in standard mode. IE 8 was set to perpetuate the neverending cycle by defaulting to quirks mode yet again. Now, however, Microsoft is doing an about-face and setting IE 8 to default to Standards mode.
I, for one, could not be happier. I've spent the better part of my short web design career tearing my hair out over pages that
should look perfect in IE, but for whatever reason just do something totally different. There's nothing quite like that sinking feeling when I'm done with the initial design of a site: first I test it in Firefox, then I test it in Safari, then I test it in Opera, and finally I test it in IE ... and say "what the
fuck?! Why the fuck is it doing that? Every other browser is fine!!"
I'm not talking alpha transparency in .png's here either (yes, I know that's fixed in IE 7). I'm talking seriously fucked up problems with IE like a div just deciding "eh, I'm going to line up 8 pixels to the right for no particular reason. Why? Because it's IE! Anything goes! Weeeeee!" Then I spend the next 6 hours researching why this is only to figure out I have to put some script into the page or add "<(#$??" or some other random character before certain properties of my CSS.
Catch my drift? Pain in the ass.
At any rate, I can only hope IE 8 starts to change those days. With that, I leave you with this amazing diagram I saw from a web designer who's apparently also tired of IE.