Oh Lord!

Remember those DOCTYPE tags that were supposed to tell the browser how to render the content of the page? Well, they've pretty much lost their meaning. Why?

1. Developers were using DOCTYPE tags for years without understanding their purpose.
2. Internet Explorer was ignoring the web-standards behind the DOCTYPE.
3. Developers only tested their pages in IE, possibly before the popularity of Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.

In a nutshell, it was the developer's ignorance combined with Microsoft's lack of interest in updating Internet Explorer after version 6.0. (Microsoft released IE 1.0 to IE 6.0 in six years, but IE 6.0 to IE 7.0 took more than five years!)

The result? The inability to move Internet Explorer to web-standards without breaking all those sites that suffer from the aforementioned problems. Microsoft is very afraid of "breaking the web," as they say. A lot of people were angry when their pages didn't render "correctly" in IE7, though the browser was trying to rendering their page according to the DOCTYPE they were using, which was basically ignored in the old versions of IE.

Now things are supposed to be getting better. IE8 now passes the Acid 2 test, which is a great step forward for the Microsoft team, but we have to explicitly tell IE to render in standards mode using a new meta tag. If we fail to use this tag IE will still use the old rendering engine from yesteryears.

The New Meta Tag

The meta tag tells the browser which browser version the page was originally designed for.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

In this case, the meta tag says the page was designed for IE8.

However, what frustrates many of us is that IE's default rendering behavior is still going to be the old one. This means that people who don't necessarily know what they're doing are still going to be designing pages for the old rendering engine—indefinately. I find that the world's most commonly-used browser is "opt-in" for web-standards is a little troubling, but it's the only sure way for IE to stay backwards compatible.

It's a little progress at a cost, I guess.

All I know is that I'll still be supporting IE6 and IE7 until their marketshare falls into negligible numbers, which doesn't look to be anytime soon. The one-design-fits-all dream is slightly closer, but still so far away. In the mean time I'm going to start making space on my sites for a new meta tag.