I've been programming for many years. I'm pretty good, but I'm no fool to think I am the best. One thing that has annoyed me was developers' blatant disregard for web standards. They keep throwing in <div> <center <p> in random places, refreshing the page to see how it looks, and saying "job done" when it looks the way they want. I still make little goofy mistakes like leaving an "&" without converting it to "&", but that's the worst it should get.
I've adopted
XHTML 1.1 for almost all of my sites* and decided to test it in IE8 RC1. One of my sites is
http://www.newlenoxesda.net/. You can see the
original site here that makes IE8 offer/recommend
compatibility view. I loaded her up in IE8 and I got this cute little button telling me the site may not be compatible with IE8.
A few different angles here: IE 8 should be compatible with XHTML1.1 and therefore it should automatically know that a site listed as XHTML1.1 is IE8 compatible. Microsoft requires developers to add a meta tag to say the site is IE8 compatible. WHAAT? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING ME. I'm not a fan of the caps parade, but this is a insane. I thought we all were making progress by creating open standards and accepting other open standards? Why the hell should I have to worry about one more ****** browser I have to program for specifically? What about IE9? Will I need to have another tag for this? God help us if Firefox, Opera, and Safari decide they want to create a new version that wants a specific meta tag. I had to add
Microsoft's recommendation/fix "<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" />" to make IE8 stop complaining.
There are still some pros to the compatibility view, but to force something proprietary like this is a bit disturbing. I'd be a fan of this if the IE8 engine was generating many errors, and THEN recommended the compatibility view.
*confession, my blog is not an example of this. I pay for shared hosting right now and it was the best choice
