RE: standard out of the box

It is easy to say when your market-share is below 30% combined (I am no expert in the actual number so I am just guessing here).

When we shipped IE7 we got major feedback from customers and web-developers that their sites broke. We did a massive outreach program (similar to what David Storey as Web Opener is doing for Opera to convince sites to use standards appropriate behavior). But even Microsoft is a too small a company to educate 1.5 billion users and their site administrators (also some sites could not be updated since the author did not maintain their sites anymore)..

If you want to educate yourself or participate in the discussion, there is a lengthy thread on this topic in the HTML5 working group mailing list, which I think we do not need to repeat over here :)

-- Markus [MSFT]


-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of fantasai
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:05 AM
To: Alex Mogilevsky
Cc: Håkon Wium Lie; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: standard out of the box


Alex Mogilevsky wrote:
> It is to be decided how exactly you get into standards mode. It sounds like what you are
> suggesting is that IE8 is standard by default, and that it abandons compatibility with its
> previous versions. Is this what you think would be best for the web?
>
> Don't get me wrong, I don't have any attachment to quirks mode. I would love to use standards
> everywhere. But certainly, if we just drop quirks mode, we'll break millions of pages. Somehow we
> have to be able to tell that a page is actually designed for standards.
>
> What do you think is the right way to decide if a page will not be broken if rendered in 100%
> standard mode?

I would suggest that any doctype that triggers full standards mode
in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari would be a good candidate for triggering
full standards mode in IE8.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2007 20:26:05 UTC