Comments on: Will IE 8 Break the Web?

By: Dan Klarmann

Dan Klarmann — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:45:49 +0000

Edgar, excellent article. I hope they at least have a “designer’s mode” to help those who compose pages meet the standards, whatever they may be. I remember when Netscape 3 was more forgiving than the newer IE 1.0. I scrambled for days to fix my “bad” pages that looked fine in Netscape, AOL, and Mozilla, but not in IE.

Now, the tables are turning.

By: Edgar Montrose

Edgar Montrose — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:56:31 +0000

An interesting explanation of this here.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:43:00 +0000

projektleiterin: “I thought the web designers were complaining that IE was not adhering to the W3C web standards and that they were therefore forced to use hacks to make their websites look right?”

The ‘real’ web designers have been, yes.

But there’s a world of web sites out there coded by people who know just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous, and which were not so much designed as merely hacked away at until they finally rendered somewhat decently in IE. These sites typically break in W3C-compliant browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Opera (although Firefox has gotten pretty good at handling broken sites gracefully). It’s *this* category of casual / naive web developer that is likely to complain about Microsoft’s decision.

But in response to the title, “Will IE 8 Break the Web?” No, the web is already broken; all IE 8 will do is to force the bad web developers to finally own up to this.

By: Dan Klarmann

Dan Klarmann — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:15:28 +0000

There are some features that IE never properly implemented. Some complex pages have to be designed to serve one page to IE and another for all the other browsers.

From the MS perspective, the worse problem is that sites designed only for IE will not work as well in IE 8. For the rest of us, bravo to latecomer Microsoft for finally giving up their pose as a leader on the web. They may still hold the most desktops (hostage), but their stock is fading as open source offerings proliferate.

Disclosure: Although I am a FireFox partisan, and used Netscape for years before IE first came out, I have Windows XP on my machines, and use MS Office more often than its free counterpart, OpenOffice.

By: Edgar Montrose

Edgar Montrose — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:45:13 +0000

As an Opera user, I welcome this. It’s frustrating visiting sites that don’t work with Opera and knowing, with reasonable certainty, that it’s not Opera’s fault. Opera adamantly defends that they play strictly by the rules; it’s about time that Microsoft did, too.

By: projektleiterin

projektleiterin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:38:38 +0000

I thought the web designers were complaining that IE was not adhering to the W3C web standards and that they were therefore forced to use hacks to make their websites look right?