Microsoft announced today on the IE Blog that IE 8 will run in high standards mode by default, which is a complete about face from the previous position that was going to require special meta-tag headers to force the browser to run this way. This is an unexpected, but very welcome turn of events and brings some hope that we'll in our lifetime will have a version of IE that is compliant with the remainder of the browser world.

This change won't come without some pain to most Web developers and not without some hollering and screaming by people who still have sites and pages that are running depending on some of IE's quirks especially in pre 7.0 versions. It's no surprise to find many sites have pages - probably buried deep in the hierarchy stack of the site - that were designed 10 years ago with little or no thought towards Web standards. I know I have now nearly 15 years worth of content on my site and there's quite a bit of it is just plain horrid. When IE 7 rolled around I spent a bit of time going through my site to clean up *some* of the content and move it forward to XHTML 1.1 provisional and it's a process I'm still working on. It's an ongoing process although thankfully I've never been using hacks explicitly nor were my childish designs ever critical enough to actually break horribly across browser versions. Which isn't to say there isn't some buggered up content on the site (no emails please <g>).

The real advantage though of going with the most standard compliant implementation possible is of course that it brings the major browsers more on par, so that there will hopefully be less special case coding/layout that needs to occur for each browser. Traditionally adjusting code to get IE to do the right thing has been the hardest part in layout and even more so for client scripting. If it weren't for JavaScript libraries to take the sting out of some of this pain I think'd have shot myself in the head by now <g>...

It's really good to see that Microsoft has listened to the feedback in this debate and has decided to go with what I think is the sensible solution of supporting standards to the full extent possible. It's going to be short term pain, but as we move forward with ever more complex HTML based applications having a standard browser model is key and the sooner this happens in consistency the better. The sooner we get the pain point over with the better. There's no point in dragging the inevitable out and only polluting the browser compatibility list even more. Right off! One yank...

In these days of automated browser updates getting the latest version browsers to a large percentage of users is ever so much quicker that hopefully compliancy will take hold relatively quickly...

And pigs will fly out of my butt soon... <g>