Ninja Rants and Raves

I read a recent IEBlog entry and was quite interested in the problems that the IE team were facing with regards to the various rendering modes and standards compatibility with different IE engines and in particular the one being developed for IE8. Their greatest concern was to define a method of ensuring that IE8 users wouldn’t suddenly see “broken” websites due to that websites use of particular html/CSS/JavaScript hacks used to work around the various non-standard rendering modes of  previous IE browsers (prior to IE8).

I also read the A List Apart article and this basically discussed the problem-solving decisions and recommendations made by the joint-working teams of The Web Standards Project and Microsoft. All very interesting stuff. But then something strange happened. A number of articles began appearing at various websites which were highly critical of the proposed use of meta tags for switching standards modes. But these articles were not persuasive in their arguments. No, these arguments were not arguments. They were vitriolic statements and without real logic or support. The fanaticism against the proposed meta tags for standards switching in IE8 was just amazing. The fanatics even went after the well respected CSS expert Eric Meyer regarding his article where he provided his perspective on the use of the proposed meta tags. It was quite sad actually. Eric Meyer has written follow-up articles on his website regarding the way he was treated.

I really have no idea why people behave this way but I’m sure someone has studied the parallels with religious fanatics! I think the proposed meta tags are a good idea and I’ll adjust my code accordingly. It must be emphasised that we do not live in a perfect world and people need to remember this. My own code is mostly xhtml 1.1 compatible but there are a few non-standard tags employed by my automated navigation html authoring software and it’s so useful that I decided to keep them, and I’m also aware that I’m not serving the pages as proper application/xhtml+xml and have used the default text/html MIME type (yes, it’s tag-soup!).  In fact I’m not sure that I would do so even if all the code did validate.

The thing is…IE and Firefox all render the pages correctly (I don’t care much about Opera these days as they’re not particularly unique/useful these days, and I don’t have access to “proper” Safari yet). And this is important to me. I know that practically everyone out there will see the pages more or less the way I want them to see them. I’m not being lazy. There is a lot to do out there. When IE7 was in beta I used it to test my modified code so that correct rendering was achieved in IE6, IE7 and Firefox. And so I was prepared when IE7 was released formally into the wild. But just think of all that “legacy” code out there especially at the larger sites. It WILL take a long time to update code to take advantage of IE8 but, in the mean time, most rational people are aware of the critical need not to disrupt the user experience or cause loss of business to commercial websites. I think meta tags are the way to go. I’m no expert, but brains bigger than mine have looked at this and there does seem to be consensus forming that we need to go forward and that the use of meta tags is possibly the one with the least pain.

Copyright © 2008 Kulvinder Singh Matharu - All Rights Reserved