In Traction

Although there has been quite some debate about the newly introduced X-UA-Compatible meta tag in Internet Explorer 8, I noticed it is only necessary for backwards compatibility (at least in the developer beta). If a website does not look good on IE8, designers can add a special meta tag to indicate which version of IE it will be rendered in:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

In my opinion, that’s a lot less harmful than having to add a meta tag to actually get the new standards compliant behavior. Consequently, IE8 renders my homepage correctly, which is great news. I made the decision not to adjust my design to be conform with IE’s rendering a while ago. The future is looking bright as the problem will solve itself after a while.

Here’s a screenshot of IE8 beta 1 correctly rendering my homepage

Most features that didn’t work before but do now are CSS related: content generation (for separating the breadcrumbs), unordered lists styled as tables, correctly positioning hovering submenu’s, etc.

Update: Apparently the IE developers changed their mind which is why standards-compliant websites now work out of the box in IE8.

For some time now, I have had a weird bug concerning an Ajax updater script in a Rails application. The updater worked with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer (IE).

Yesterday I finally figured out IE can only update div or span elements, when I came across this message on the Rails list. I was trying to update a table instead.

After wrapping the table in a div, and updating that div, everything worked.

Would be nice if this would have been documented in Prototype or the script.aculo.us scripts though.

Well, let me explain this provocing title. I tried to render my homepage with Internet Explorer 7, and the result is even worse than with Internet Explorer 6.

Here are some pictures to prove my point. First the correct rendering with Firefox:

[img:97858251,medium]

Then Internet Explorer 6:

[img:97858249,medium]

And finally, Internet Explorer 7:

[img:97858250,medium]

Please note that my homepage is valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS.

It seems IE7 is nothing more than IE6 with some trivial fixes, such as alpha transparency for PNG images. Of course, supporting modern web standards would lead to Microsoft breaking its own websites. Furthermore it would break all HTML that depends on IE’s non-standard rendering, such as the HTML generated by FrontPage or ASP.NET.