X-No-Really
It’s sad to reach the point where “epic fail” is the most apt term I can come up with to describe an article by Zeldman, but that’s where I am today. His article “Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?” in today’s ALA is so far off the mark that, honestly, I can’t come up with any other description.
No, Microsoft is not relevant anymore.
No, the default behavior is not correct.
No, the switch does not solve the problems the IE team claims to be fighting.
No, it is not and never will be my responsibility to help Microsoft maintain its market share.
Seven years ago this week, Zeldman kicked off the standards revolution when he said, “To hell with bad browsers”.
Today I say: amen to that, and to hell with “standards” advocates who won’t stand by that principle.
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February 19, 2008
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I agree 100% with you sentiment and I am baffled that Zeldman of all people is in favor this abomination from M$.
February 19, 2008
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Quite frankly, I’m just surprised this thing has become such a big deal. I side with you on this matter, but I just don’t see it as a huge issue. I don’t like it, but I’ll take the five minutes to drop a meta tag in my documents or configure my server to send the right head, and more the eff on. What’s the big deal, really?
February 19, 2008
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Jeff, Microsoft’s problems are Microsoft’s problems. Trying to push those problems off to other people, via a system in which you either opt in to what they want you to do or lose progressive enhancement, is flat-out wrong. If we don’t fight it right now — if we don’t push back hard and refuse to buy in — then the list of “oh, just do these little things” will inevitably start getting longer and longer, our jobs will get harder and harder, and we’ll have less and less power to fight it.
February 19, 2008
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Why is the DOCTYPE “switch” considered as a simple boolean by its presence or not? The whole purpose of the SGML DOCTYPE (or better yet, the XML namespace) is to identify which standard your document adheres to. So why can’t a new version of IE recognize the value of the DOCTYPE and not just its presence. If for example you have an XHTML 1.1 doctype (and not an HTML 4.01), then the new browser will render in full standards mode, period. And certainly if it ever saw an HTML 5 doctype/namespace (once they are ready) it should render in full standard mode, and no one should have to add any meta tags, ever. It should be obvious, but if someday you’re writing an HTML 5 document, you are implicitly saying you don’t care about backwards compatibility with browsers that pre-date HTML 5 or don’t understand HTML 5.
Only if IE saw some older doctype such as for 4.01, that would most likely indicate a broken crapware-authored document, would it then render in not-quite-standards-mode. That way, there is a path so that eventually version targeting would not be necessary as the HTML standard itself progresses to newer versions. Microsoft could just say, once your documents “claim” to be XHTML 1.1, or any later version, IE will always render it as close to the standards as possible; regardless of what older IE versions did with the content.
Another option, that the REST people might like, is to take advantage of the content-type with text/html versus application/xhtml+xml. Then you can do proper content negotiation. Since IE <= 7 doesn’t handle the later, then IE8 could use that as “the switch”…it should send it in the Accept: header, and if the document it gets back is application/xhtml+xml rather than text/html, then it ALWAYS renders in standards mode…no doctype switching or no meta tag madness required at all.
February 19, 2008
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Zeldman is so wrong. Does he also support Safari, Firefox and Opera version targeting?
February 19, 2008
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Since some people wonder why this is an important issue, see the follow-up.
February 21, 2008
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James,
I completely agree that it is a Microsoft problem to solve.
Just to keep everyone honest here, if any of you are making the above statement and object to it - yet use/implement the rel=”no-follow” attribute on anchors - you’d best update those sites since it was a Google problem if I recall.
Thoughts?
Al.
February 21, 2008
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Al: If I don’t use
nofollow, Google won’t disable the ability of a browser to take advantage of progressively-enhanced features; hence you’ve raised nothing more than a red herring.Though
nofollowis about as effective at solving comment spam asX-UA-Compatiblewill be at solving forward compatibility for IE…