MS IE8 announced as Web standards compatible by default!

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By Colin Ramsden, March 2008.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (2007)

In a dramatic turn-around (of apparent finance-driven attitude) after extensive web-development community objections and complaints (Ref:1), Microsoft (MS) have performed an abrupt about-turn in direction and announced that their newest version of Internet Explorer version 8 (IE8) will by-default render content to "Web standards interoperability" (Ref:2). This is widely considered by the Web-development community as the biggest win for good Web-design in the history of MS involvement since MS chairman Bill Gates declared that the "Internet phenomena" was to be "the foundation for this new world" at the Professional Developers Conference in San Francisco, way back in 1996 (Ref:3).

The recent furore erupted in Web-development community blogs on 21 January 2008 after MS announced the impending IE8 Beta 1 'release-to-public' version browser would default to 'quirks' mode HTML page rendering for IE7 compatibility and require an additional IE custom meta tag to render in Web standards mode instead.

Even so, the exact level of Web standards compatibility for IE8 was still not revealed. Current Web standards are HTML 4.01 (Ref:4), XHTML 1.1 (Ref:5), DOM L2 Core (Ref:6), CSS 2.1 (Ref:7), and JavaScript 1.5 (Ref:8). The Web-development community had developed a compatibility test called Acid 2 (Ref:9), which applied and tested for compatibility with those standards. By not transparently and explicitly declaring the level of compatibility for each standard, MS has deliberately concealed their level of compliance with each standard. Their caveated description of (partial) "Web standards interoperability" was not the same as declaring (full) Web-standards compliance. So don't be fooled by the MS marketing propaganda, IE8 was not and will never be fully Web-standards compliant. At best, it may be seen as step towards that ideal situation.

The March 3 MS announcement states "Internet Explorer 8 has been designed to include three rendering modes: one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web."

As a measure of Microsoft's concerns about the legal (and financial) ramifications of such product behaviour, MS in this instance have quoted their legal counsel Brad Smith "While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue". Now, I'm not legally trained, and don't pretend to have or present a legal view on any subject about this, however, this statement seems to me to be somewhat ambiguous. I don't see how this step "clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue"? But that's another story; a distraction which demonstrates Microsoft's concerns about the potential legal ramifications of NOT providing fully backward compatible browsers, and an insight to their way of thinking.

Let's not get distracted here, MS have NEVER provided fully backward compatible browser versions, so any claim that IE8 should or might do so is theoretical only, and has no basis or historical ancestry to imply that it should. (Ref:10)

There's been a lot of Web ink spilt on attempting to rationalise the reasoning behind MS's first decision to provide IE8 with a backwards compatible renderer by default (Ref:11, Ref:12, Ref:13), and their subsequent turn-around announcement to provide IE8 with a Web-standards (implementation) renderer by default (Ref:14, Ref:15, Ref:16, Ref:17). The MSIE team blog site initial announcement (Ref:1) garnered a unprecedented massive 694 comments alone, before it was closed a month later. Incidentally, the IE team blog with the next highest number of 662 comments was the announcement of the intended standards behaviour of IE7 (Ref:18)!

The major reason for remaining backwards-compatible by default, appears to be in support of the display of poorly formed HTML documents which displayed well-enough in previous versions of IE. For reasons dating back to the browser-wars of the nineties, IE has been doctored to permit the display of proprietary and poorly formed HTML documents, thus encouraging those documents, and their proprietary and poorly formed HTML to persist. MS have embedded various versions of their doctored IE display engines into many of their other software products, including the Windows Operating System (OS), Office documents (Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, PowerPoint, FrontPage), HTML Help, and Windows Explorer.

Furthermore, because IE is embedded within the Windows OS, installing a later version will overwrite the previous version, and therefore no two different versions of IE can exist on the same system at the same time (without a lot of trouble). The concern will be that to upgrade a user's system to the latest version of IE will likely break one or more of the aforementioned programs which made use of the IE components, and make them unable to accurately display poorly formed HTML documents (or portions of documents) which displayed adequately in the previous version of IE before the upgrade was performed. To the user, it may appear that the document was now broken.

Thus is the MS IE conundrum: by supporting the display of poorly formed HTML well beyond its use-by-date; by encouraging the use of non-standard (proprietary) Web hacks to have standard-compliant HTML display as expected in IE; and by embedding the IE components within the Windows OS and MS proprietary products; MS have sealed the fate of IE. Now they find themselves at an intersection. Which way should they go?

Chris Wilson, the then IE lead program manager back in March 2005, stated (Ref:19): "Given the strong usage of IE in the corporate space as well as embedded in applications, we have a strong requirement for backwards compatibility with our previous behavior, compliant or not; that requirement does not mean “don’t touch anything”, it is just a recognition that keeping our engine in sync across strict and quirks modes is challenging when quirks mode has to work nearly exactly the same as it always has. We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility, and under quirks mode when it’s not damaging to our backwards compatibility."

As stated by Mike Davies from Yahoo Europe (Ref:11): "It's ironic, that of all the major browser vendors out there today, only Microsoft is the one that's still building on the same codebase that they delivered during the browser wars. Every other browser has either started from scratch from the ground up (Firefox and Opera), or created a browser after the browser-wars (Safari). As such, all three have benefited from not having to support Microsoft's excess baggage."

As stated by Joel Polsky (Ref:12), "it’s the difference between “idealists” and “realists,” explaining "you’ll see that it’s the same reason Microsoft Vista is selling so poorly, and it’s the same issue [with] the Raymond Chen camp (pragmatists) at Microsoft vs. the MSDN camp (idealists), the MSDN camp having won, and now nobody can figure out where their favorite menu commands went in Microsoft Office 2007, and nobody wants Vista", summising with "As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the [Web community] world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that."

Joel closes with a secret prediction: "Secretly? Here’s what I think is going to happen. The IE8 team [is] going to tell everyone that IE8 will use web standards by default, and run a nice long beta during which they beg people to test their pages with IE8 and get them to work. And when they get closer to shipping, and only 32% of the web pages in the world render properly, they’ll say, “look guys, we’re really sorry, we really wanted IE8 standards mode to be the default, but we can’t ship a browser that doesn’t work,” and they’ll revert to the pragmatic decision. Or maybe they won’t, because the pragmatists at Microsoft have been out of power for a long time. In which case, IE is going to lose a lot of market share, which would please the idealists to no end."

If you're interested in finding out about Web standards, start with the Web Standards Project—Learn section (Ref:20).

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References:

1. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8

2. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-03WebStandards.mspx

3. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/default.mspx

4. http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/

5. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/

6. http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/

7. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/

8. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm

9. http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/