"Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being" ... Jean-Paul Sartre
IE8 & Version Targeting
It all began, well I read it there first, on A List Apart – No.#251 …
The following is from the Zeldman himself … Jeffrey Zeldman said on January 23rd, 2008 at 7:02 am:
No less an authority than PPK will be writing about the consequences for DOM scripting in an upcoming issue of A List Apart.
The onus should be on the people who are doing things the ‘wrong’ way to take that extra step
But many won’t; for them, IE7 behavior makes sense as a default (since they did at least test in IE7).
I co-founded and for several key years led the group that got standards in our browsers and persuaded designers to learn to use them.
I publish the magazine that has long championed standards-based development.
I wrote the book that created standards-based design as a category, shaking up publishing as well as web development.
I’m well aware that it will be a better world when every developer creates semantic, accessible websites. I’ve written and published and lectured all over to try to bring about that outcome.
I also know that we’re not there yet.
And sites “breaking” (suddenly no longer displaying or behaving correctly with the introduction of a new browser) won’t magically get us there. Whether Microsoft follows through on version targeting or not is irrelevant to the goal of educating web developers about standards. A “broken” site won’t lead masses of developers to become educated about standards. That argument – that the default should be to break the site – doesn’t hold up, because it assumes that developers will do the right thing.
Many just won’t.
This doesn’t mean we stop putting educational materials out there. It doesn’t mean we stop trying to persuade our colleagues that standards and accessibility are in their interest.
It means we don’t ignore the fact of widespread developer ignorance of standards-based design.
It means, if the default Microsoft proposes helps mitigate the negative effects of widespread developer ignorance of standards-based design, we at least consider the possibility that Microsoft may know more about standards-unaware developers than we do, and they may have a point.
Developers who want the default behavior to be latest can opt in via “edge.”
The scenario Microsoft seems to have had in mind is more probable than the one Jeremy Keith raises. That a developer will want IE8 to behave like Firefox, Opera, and Safari where generated content is concerned, but won’t know to write the meta element that IE8 requires to behave like IE8, is far less likely than the scenario of the standards-ignorant developer not knowing or caring about any of this, and being shocked when his site goes blooey in IE8.
Statistically alone, it makes more sense to protect the ignorant (and their clients) from themselves and to ask the educated to do a little extra than to expect the ignorant, who already don’t do enough, to magically gain knowledge and skill and do more.
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