Free Software Linux

An explosion of public beta releases of our favorite web browsers, operating systems, and webapps recently have made brave testers and curious early adopters very happy. Many of these betas appear...

It was about mid-December, just after Opera Software filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft -- partly focused on Internet Explorer not following web standards -- that Microsoft finally came out and publicly announced their support for key web standards in version 8 of their prolific web browser. With the recent release of IE8's first Beta the public can now finally find out for themselves just how well they have done that. What is even more interesting -- and perhaps a matter of debate -- is that they have done it in such a way as to not "Break the Web." Or in other words, they plan to deliver IE8 with backwards compatibility by introducing a controversial third operating mode.

It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8: "John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode. "John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ . read more

A List Apart's Issue 253 continues discussing and debating the controversial IE version targeting that ALA announced a month ago. CivicActions blogged about this topic then too. Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman provide very realistic and down-to-earth points of view and arguments both for and against version targeting. Although they each reach different conclusions, neither tries to persuade the reader one way or the other. Rather they leave you more enlightened so that you can make your own decision.

"...All Microsoft did was produce a screenshot ostensibly demonstrating MSIE8 passing Acid2. They distributed no code for people to verify this alleged standards compliance for themselves, not even proprietary code. To me this represents a significant low in how many people are willing to give credit for something they can’t verify, something typically called vaporware..."