Comments for Big Questions On IE8's Big Progress
Matt: Re validation... see below... :-)
Indeed I saw below. It makes a nice point about whether standards matter right now or not (did make me grin). But it's not pro-active in getting the web sorted out, and as the entire debate is about making things better for the future...
Alex Mogilevsky wrote:
Great questions, and I really hope more people and products get serious about adding information to web content that tells the browser what is the proper way to render it. Now IE8 vs. FF3 may look like an enormous difference, but think of what software will have to do 10 year, or why not 100 years from now… Considering the range of content sources that will exist then, just being pointed at a date range of a couple of years is a blessing!In fact, the more we know about a page the better. The whole idea of a version tag comes not from a page being “tied to” a browser but rather being “tested with”. It is fine to specify any number of platforms and versions, the browser should choose the best it can render.
That of course means meta doesn’t “overrule” http header. Both apply.
Will it be a standard? I think it should. If it does become a standard it may very well look different from “X-UA-Compatible” – we arrived to that one having constraints of maintaining valid HTML under current standards and being friendly to legacy tools… But of course for being a standard it needs a broad acceptance from multiple companies. Let’s see how fast it gets there...
I hope that in addition to the meta tag they require a valid page before triggering IE8 mode. More on my thoughts on why that'd be good for everyone on my blog post, as I don't think you'd appreciate such a large tangent of a comment:
http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/956/