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Archiver > Freepages-Help > 2008-06 > 1213648085


From: Barry Carlson <>
Subject: Re: [FreeHelp] Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:28:47 +1200
References: <4856A78F.6050606@swbell.net>


Billie Walsh wrote:-
On Tuesday, June 17, 2008 5:49 AM (UTC+12)


> http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1441&tag=nl.e539
>

Quote article:

In a June 10 posting on the IE Blog, members of the IE team reminded
site owners — many of whom had designed their sites to display
correctly in less-standards-compliant, prior versions of IE — that
they need to "get ready" for IE 8 so that their content will "continue
to display seamlessly."

So in other words, any web developer who tested their site with firefox or
opera
in the first place gets to have another beer in the sun.

Those who didn't have more work to do.
--------------------
Billie

Yes, but the same IE developers have accepted that they and their forebears
have made a mess of things in the past, and following pressure from the web
development community have accepted that what has been done can't be undone.

There are hundreds of thousands of websites out there built to render
correctly in IE6, and with Conditional Comments likewise in IE5.xx. Without
being able to tell a browser what version of IE the site renders correctly
in, future browsers will do their best and deliver some kind of mess. IE6
was around without any substantial modification for 6 years before IE7 came
on the scene, and with IE8 to be released later this year(?) something had
to be done to fix the mess.

The modification to your pages built for IE6 in bygone years is simple - add
the following META tag to the head section of each of your pages (
preferably the first meta tag and not later than the first one after
<title> ) -

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=6"> or
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=6" /> if XHTML

- this will let IE8 and its successors know how to render the page.

What about the Document Type Declaration (DTD)? Well, that is just that, it
tells a browser that the page was designed to a particular Standard, but it
doesn't know whose interpretation of that Standard it should follow. So,
each browser will render a page with a valid DTD to the Standard it (the
browser) was designed to with the proviso that if it encounters something
that doesn't parse (make sense), it will fall back into Quirks mode and
render the page to the 'best of its ability'.

Once again IE has moved away from Standards compliance and will have a
Super-Standards mode in IE8 - to complement the "near" Standards mode that
IE7 has. Plainly put, the IE8 Super-Standards mode will equate to the W3C
Standards, while the IE8 Standards mode will be the IE7 "interpretation" of
the W3C Standards. IE6 and below are deemed to operate in Quirks mode.

Do you need to add this META tag to your hundreds/thousands of pages? Yes,
if you want your pages to render as designed into the future, though there
is a simpler way of achieving it, but it requires the Server to implement a
Header, e.g.

X-UA-Compatible: IE=6

Perhaps Rootsweb could make this a selectable option on their servers in the
future. [:o)

Barry

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