IE8 Version Targeting Final Thoughts: It’s About The Users

Posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The debate still rages regarding Microsoft’s decision to allow web developers to target which version of IE they want to render their pages in. I have made my thoughts known and follwed up when I learned more. As I have spent some time away from the computer and had time to reflect, I just wanted to make my final thoughts known on the subject.

A Quick Correction

In my last post I referred to “lazy developers” being those that wouldn’t necessarily want to, or know how to, fix their sites if a new browser release broke them. Zeldman put this in a much better way with “the second-grade teacher defense” and I concede that, due to poor writing by myself, I was horribly off the mark and I hope I didn’t offend anyone. Rather than those who cannot be bothered, it is those who create websites for themselves and their close communities, teams or families, those who don’t know what a web standard is or what the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox in terms of rendering is, those who certainly don’t have a copy of Zeldman’s book at home to consult that will be affected. Rather than their sites falling apart at the mere mention of a new version of IE, they will have some stability and IE users around the world will not suffer when they “upgrade” their browser.

Users, Users, Users

That last point above really is the crux of the issue. Perhaps releasing the information on A List Apart to a bunch of web standards fanatics wasn’t the best of ideas, since the first thing you ask is, “What’s in it for me?”

For everyone who reads A List Apart, there is potentially nothing of any use in the version targeting, especially since we can sidestep the version lock in using the “edge” keyword or unknown DOCTYPES, like HTML5. The real benefit is to users, and Microsoft has a lot of them. The thing is, if a new version of IE breaks a website, any user of that site who upgrades sees or is unable to use that broken site. I had a great conversation about this in the comments of Joe Dolson’s post on the matter, which is worth reading too.

Software Issues

The final concerns I have about the matter are based around IE itself. Carrying rendering engines and legacy code, maintaining and patching them but retaining the same bugs is all going to be incredibly hard to do and Microsoft have their work cut out for them for the future now. I only wonder whether this plan is meant to fail eventually, once Microsoft has had some breathing space and managed to finally catch up with implementing the standards that we have already. Then the consideration is whether someone invents another switch or whether there should be one final hit, one more “breaking the web”, before we can view IE as an equal with the other browsers and we never have to switch anything again.

In Conclusion

This is the last I have to say on this issue for now, unless something truly groundbreaking comes along. I don’t mind the switch, I hope it keeps the web intact for those that need it while I look forward to seeing IE support more and more standards, from Acid2 to, hopefully, CSS3.

Finally, I just wish the news had been broken using lemurs. I think there would have been a lot less hassle and everyone would have understood much quicker. Maybe something to think about for the A List Apart editors!

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Comments

  1. 1February 1st, 2008 at 8:59 am

    Neil Says:

    As long as it’s acceptable to take the stance of supporting the last two releases of a browsers, I’m happy to do so via conditional comments. In my experience, IE7 has actually proven more troublesome than IE6, but I’m sure I’ll get grips with ensuring compatibility across IE8 & 7, when we finally get there.

    I still have high hopes for the iPhone infiltrating as many pockets as the iPod, and potentially giving Webkit a much larger market share (whilst halving IE’s). I can dream, right?!


  2. 2February 4th, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Jonathan Nicol Says:

    In my last post I referred to “lazy developers” being those that wouldn’t necessarily want to, or know how to, fix their sites if a new browser release broke them.

    In my blog post on version targeting I referred to them as web authors with a “less sophisticated understanding of web standards”! It’s hard not to sound elitist, isn’t it?

    Then the consideration is whether someone invents another switch or whether there should be one final hit, one more “breaking the web”, before we can view IE as an equal with the other browsers and we never have to switch anything again.

    It’s going to have to catch up with them eventually, isn’t it! And when it does happen it will be a very big “break”, since presumably a large number of legacy sites will still be using the IE7 rendering engine, whether the site authors realise it or not…


  3. 3February 5th, 2008 at 10:03 pm

    Phil Says:

    Neil: IE7 causes more problems? That can’t be good, I always find that IE7 only takes a couple of extra tweaks to get it working, whereas IE6 frequently requires its own special style sheet! I am slightly worried that IE8 will actually make an appearance while IE6 is still knocking around (it’s fighting to remain the most popular, even now) giving us three versions to worry about! Of course, the other browsers all have my backing, though for some reason I don’t tend to use Safari at all. Even so, I trust it and would like to see greater uptake in place of IE too!

    Jonathon: I’m just not the best with words! Still, I think I eventually got the point across, plus there’s not that much shame in being a little elitist here, the outrage has been caused by those who do things “the right way”, but the truth is we’re not the only ones out there making and running web sites.

    Of course, to finally rid ourselves of switches and targeting will cause a break, but we can only hope that over the years standards support grows not only from IE but from site owners worldwide the majority of sites tend towards targeting later versions of the browser. That way it will all be a lot less painful, however a lot of work is required by Microsoft, as well as the continuing work of the web standards community, to encourage that in the meantime. We can but hope.


  4. 4February 20th, 2008 at 2:10 am

    SneakyWho_am_i Says:

    I am definitely very strongly opposed to this new thing. We already had several things to allow us to detect or react to or offer content for a variety of browsers:
    User agent strings (remember what these are for!?)
    Javascript browser detection (window.opera?)
    Doctype Declarations
    Conditional Comments
    CS Hacks
    Content Negotiation

    On and on the list gets longer and longer. Does any of this new technology replace the old? NO!! It ADDS to it and makes the web unnecessarily hard to code for.

    I agree that the absence of such extra switches like IE’s rendering engine switcher might hurt private sites but this is a necessary evil. IE6 will be fighting for market share for the next decade - MORE so if the default rendering engine in future versions of IE is only IE7.

    I, for one, don’t want to have to deal with all these ancient versions of browsers forever, and I’m not going to encourage Microsoft or anyone else to create yet more mechanisms for us to create pages that aren’t interoperable between comparable browser versions. You should NEVER code your page for just one version of a browser. Never! The standards don’t change, browsers do!

    There should be no mechanism to encourage people to code that way, either.this new IE= meta tag will become just part of the furniture. It’ll blend into the background and eventually we will need to add even more tags to our pages and on and on it goes ad infinitum, until 99% of my particular web page is all made up of “compatibility code”, and the download size is 2MB for the markup alone.

    This is a big step backwards. We should just use HTML5 (or a comparable AND APPROPRIATE doctype) and standards-compliant code. And wait for Microsoft to catch up.

    Is it about the users? YES. Ultimately it is, particularly if your boss says so ;)

    Taking extra steps to make my content work for IE is a great stupid waste of time and I refuse to play those stupid games any more.


  5. 5February 20th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

    Phil Says:

    Chris, while it is very easy for those who only make sites for themselves, everyone else makes sites for the general public. Sadly, most of them use Internet Explorer in one form or another. It is not about one’s boss telling you to make a site functional in all browsers, it is about universal access (or at least, as best you can get) and if that means pandering to IE users, then so be it, there aren’t that many companies out there who could afford to alienate over 70% of their potential customers because they are using the “wrong” browser.

    Admittedly, this whole thing does leave a slightly bad taste in the mouth, but I believe that it is for the best, that it will promote standards for the future and that we will see better versions of Internet Explorer that won’t need workarounds and extra code. When that day comes, and it may well be just around the corner with IE8, we can all expect a whole lot less stress when it comes to developing a site. Maybe on that day we will thank IE for including version targeting to get us to that point.


  6. 6February 21st, 2008 at 12:58 am

    SneakyWho_am_i Says:

    All very valid points. I will admit that my reasons to refuse to comply with their ultimatum are partly emotional, because back when I had to make things work for IE … ahhh it still hurts.

    So maybe my view will change.I do nowadays mostly make sites for myself. I will be using M$’s fancy tag on work sites, but not mine.

    I LIKE alienating people [insert devil]..

    Yes though, to look at it very coldly, I may change my mind some day about this. hopefully it will just naturally DIE. I don’t mean IE. When IE performs as expected without me having to walk an extra mile in broken shoes, I will rejoice. I mean the tag. Hopefully the tag reaches the end of its life before I ever feel tempted to use it.

    I’m very excited about XHTML2 & CSS3, and I hope that IE8 (9?) will just parse it to the best of its ability without any extra effort on my part, and manage to not utterly ruin the page.

    Off topic:
    Right now I’m using XHTML1.1+target attribute for links+SVG+MathML, served as application/xhtml+xml

    It all works out really well :) I haven’t tested in IE yet and I’m concerned bout how it will turn out.

    But this is why I would kill for support for a few things in IE AND Firefox:
    - XForms (which Firefox can do, but with an extension.)
    - SVG (which most browsers can do)
    - being able to make any element into a hyperlink
    - being able to make any element into an image (not just object tags and img)
    - moving tag attributes into the content. Alt is a required attribute. Nobody seems to understand this. There’s no way to show or tell or teach them. No amount of SERPs and Lynx and Section 508 and WCAG is going to change it, but moving the longdesc/alt into the tag content is a big step in the right direction.
    - XML Events

    .. We can emulate a lot of this now with custom DTDs, , XHTML1 and HTML4, javascript, extensions etc…. But it’s not the same. Am I ready to implement these things? Yes. I’ve done the intro course on XForms and read practically every available piece of documentation…
    My biggest concern until I heard that IE8 would pass ACID2 was that I’d have to sit down in five years to write a webpage, only to find that I had to offer a feature-limited version of the site to backwards Internet Explorer. Normally this is not a problem, people using Lynx generally don’t want to watch streaming movies etc… But with IE it IS a problem, IE users do want to see rich content, unfortunately.

    I have a project coming up where I will need to use a lot of javascript and CSS across domains. It’s in Quirks Mode, there will be no fancy IE meta tags or any of that sort of thing to help me,and I will be developing on a Linux box, where IE 5.5, 6 and 7 can start but look absolutely terrible and aren’t exactly “fast”. Sadly this project is going to be for the general public, and by obligation I will HAVE to make it work for IE.
    I’m not looking forward to it.

    The neighbours can hear me swearing when I am coding for IE :(


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