Great post on Slashdot today talking about Microsoft’s announcement there will three ‘modes’ in IE8 – one of them requiring an additional meta tag.
The Slashdot comments are entertaining as always but honestly – did we really think MS could do something right? They screwed up the web years ago and now are trying to ‘fix’ things as only Microsoft can…
Update: more info on this on A List Apart- Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
And John Resig has a good post on his blog about why this may not be such a big deal.
There’s a lot of debate about this from a lot of the big players (Meyer, Zeldman, Resig, et al). It requires more thought on my part, but at a glance I’d have to say that I think I’m okay with the mechanism, but the implementation is backwards.
I understand “not breaking the web”, but it should be more than that. It should be something more along the lines of “progress the web with the option to stand still”. In other words, make progression (no meta tag) the default stand and backwards compatibility the opt-in.
As I said it requires more thought (and more reading of folks who are closer to this that I am), but that’s what I’m thinking at the moment.
@Rob – I agree completely. ‘Standard’ mode should be the default. Any ‘fallback’ mode should be optional. If you have an old site add the tag to ‘fix’ your site, if you build a standards compliant site no tag required.