14 DAY TRIAL // With the first Beta of Internet Explorer 8 scheduled to drop by mid 2008, and with additional details on the successor of Internet Explorer 7 to be offered at MIX08 this March, Microsoft has started opening up on the browser little by little. First, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager revealed in mid December that IE8 comes with support for a wide range of standards, and now, Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect, offered an insight into Internet Explorer 8 compatibility. In this context, the promise is that IE8 will not break the web.
Microsoft has a "responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier," Wilson explained.
The transition from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explore 7 delivered a very important lesson to Microsoft. This was that despite the fact that IE7 brought an evolution in terms of standard support, and was nothing short of a breath of fresh air after IE coma, web developers had continued to build websites expecting the same caveats as with IE6. This automatically generated compatibility issues and content that broke down.
"Web developers expected us, for example, to maintain our model for how content overflows its box, even in 'standards mode,' even though it didn't follow the specification - because they'd already made their content work with our model. In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had 'fixed their content' for IE. Sites didn't work, and users experienced problems," Wilson added.
In order to come up with the best possible recipe for compatibility, Microsoft sought the help of The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force). The task was just to figure out what was the best way to serve IE8 in order to deliver only a superficial impact on the content available today, while at the same time introducing advanced standards support. Wilson explained that the obvious decision was to ensure both backwards compatibility, as well as the introduction of additional support.
As such, in Internet Explorer 8 "'Quirks mode' remains the same, and compatible with current content; 'Standards mode' remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content; and if you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple element," Wilson concluded. "We believe this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content."