Re: standard out of the box (was: IE Blog: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone)

On Dec 20, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Philippe Wittenbergh wrote:

>
>
> On Dec 21, 2007, at 7:51 AM, Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
>
>> I would argue that defaulting a page that has no DOCTYPE to be  
>> standards compliant may not be the best option. There are many  
>> legacy pages out there that would break. If a person sets the  
>> DOCTYPE then that should be honored...and may still break some pages.
>
> No one is arguing this, I think.
>
> What (other) rendering engines have been doing for years:
> <http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch.html>
> <http://gutfeldt.ch/matthias/articles/doctypeswitch/table.html>
> <http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>
>
> Philippe
>

The problem is that IE6 and IE7 both have a "standards mode" already  
that is based on the doctype. And there are still tons of people who  
won't let go of IE6 because of all their legacy corporate browser- 
based applications that break when bugs are taken away. So if I  
design a page with a 4.01 doctype, I get one kind of rendering in  
IE6, another in IE7, and the more predicable kind in other browsers  
(and hopefully in IE8's standards mode). But I still need a way to  
differentiate between IE7 "standards mode" and IE8 standards mode so  
that the code I wrote to deal with IE7's bugs does not get triggered  
in IE8. A 4.01 doctype is not enough. An HTML5 doctype triggering  
true standards would be nice (especially if IE8 supported all of  
HTML5), but I do not want to have to convert all my pages to HTML5  
before I can start putting IE6-7 bugs (which would presumably  
continue to exist in IE8's backwards compatibility mode) behind me.

I would like to see something that could be added to a CSS file that  
would allow me to specify code for IE6-7 that the standards-based  
browsers (including IE8) wouldn't see, or that would allow standards- 
based browsers to see code that IE6-7 wouldn't see.

Perhaps if all other browsers are supporting media queries by the  
time IE8 is released, then we could put all of our standards-based  
CSS inside a media query with a minimum screen width of 1px, and if  
IE8 saw that then it would render everything inside based on standards.

Or perhaps there could be a rule like this:

HTML { standards:true; }

...which would tell IE8 to switch to standards mode, and not render  
anything in an IE6-7 buggy way. That way corporate intranet  
applications would continue to render the old way without being  
rewritten, but more standards-oriented authors could lose all that  
baggage (and just use existing hacks to accommodate IE6-7 while they  
are still around).

Ideally a standards:true would even work in documents with no doctype  
or with a 3.2 doctype, to get rid of the horrible rendering problems  
of IE quirks mode, since quirks mode is not so bad (even useful) in  
non-IE browsers.

Received on Friday, 21 December 2007 17:27:01 UTC