Big Ahha

In a pretty surprising move, Microsoft announced that they have changed the way that the next version of Internet Explorer will handle web standards. When news of the next browser version first appeared, Microsoft announced that IE8 would behave like IE7 unless specifically requested. This would have meant that any web designer or developer wanting to take advantage of any advanced standards support in IE would have to add a meta tag to their pages that would define which version of the IE rendering engine should be used. Not surprisingly, this caused quite an uproar in the web standards community. Whether Microsoft truly responded to public criticism or not, this is a positive change.

On the IE Blog, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Internet Explorer for Microsoft, says:

interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web. Shorter term, leading up not just to IE8’s release but broader IE8 adoption, this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.

I only hope that Microsoft maintains their newfound focus on standards and, as Eric Meyer stated:

when the public beta hits, there will [not] be [so many] incompatibility problems that pushback from other constituencies forces a change back to the original behavior.