Chris Knowles wrote:
Yeah actually I agree, they're not ignoring the mess. Just actively
covering it up by enlisting yours and my support.
My users/visitors should get the right viewing experience by default,
not by having to opt-in. On the contrary, if you wish your
users/visitors to NOT get the right viewing experience, is opting-out
by adding a meta tag really too much work?
I've swayed back and forth on this issue and I'm still not sure what my
opinion is, but I'm currently thinking along the following lines:
I don't oppose a meta tag which is effectively saying to a browser
"this is what this site was developed to work in", it's basically saying
to the browser that it can't promise that it'll work with future
versions and it's up to the browser to decide what to do. If a browser
version has relatively few rendering changes (ie any changes are either
new features that won't affect existing rendering or very minor bug
fixes) then the browser can say "i'm pretty sure your site will work in
my new version" or if there are big changes it can say "this will
probably break, i'm going to fall back to the previous version's
rendering". Conceptually this is a good idea, but I am concerned with
the amount of bloat and complexity this could add to browsers.
If from IE8 onwards Internet Explorer can keep on the game, then once
IE6 and IE7 are down to insignificant percentages we can drop
conditional comments completely. But we should still provide the http
header / meta tag as a polite notice for the reasons I mentioned in the
previous point.
The problem I see is that because their sites will apparantly work
fine in IE8 (rendering as IE7), the web developers that are less
informed will be completely unaware of the changes in the rendering
engine. As a consequence we won't be closer to solving the problem that
the vast majority of the web isn't using standards and as a consequence
the uptake of new features won't be noticably faster.
Basically, there are two problems at hand here. Firstly, breaking the
web with new browser versions. This can be addressed with this meta tag,
but this solution can't work forever. Secondly, finding a way to get the
websites that would break into a state that they wouldn't break. This is
the difficult part and I imagine it'll require a standards drive of much
greater scope than the one we experienced a few years ago.
Actually, there's a third problem, and that's the need to find a way
of allowing browser manufacturers and others to innovate with new
features in such a way that they can be used whilst somehow not breaking
the web again. Some sort of standardised rendering extension
architecture that all browsers can be used would be my suggestion,
extensions could then be automatically downloaded much like new flash
versions.
- Andrew Ingram
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