"I wonder if it’s worth some sort of cross-vendor campaign (Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, WebKit/Apple) to get users to adopt modern browsers in a much more rapid pace. IE6 is hanging around for much longer than one would like. I suspect IE 8’s adoption won’t be very quick either. Perhaps it’s necessary for it to be combined with a GoPHP5 style campaign where older browsers are unsupported as of an arbitrary date."

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On Monday, Microsoft announced from their IEBlog that they were reversing their decision for how Internet Explorer 8 would be compatible with Web pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet standards. You may recall that earlier this year Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 in "Standards Mode" would actually be rendering pages in Internet Explorer 7's "Standards Mode". If you really wanted to have IE8 follow the latest standards then you would need to insert a special <meta> tag to your pages.

While developers and users expressed opinions on both sides of the issue, I think it would be fair to say a large number of people were not happy with this decision. In my own comments, I stated that "this is just plain crazy" of a move by Microsoft as it held onto ideas of the past and not the present. In a March 3, 2008 post, Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8, the IE team explains what you can expect with IE8 compatibility based on their changed decision.

"In Dean’s recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
post, he highlighted our 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. Continuing Dean’s theme, I’d like to
talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals."

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"Standardization, centralization and simplification are the three guiding principles to help managers and employees accept new technologies, the retiring CIO and CTO of the U.S. Postal Service says."

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"Perhaps most important, Zeldman helped to pioneer the movement known as standards-based design—a yawn-inducing term that basically ensures that a Web site can be used by someone using any browser and any Web-enabled device. This concept may seem obvious today, but during the Browser Wars of the 1990s, Microsoft (MSFT) and Netscape each claimed close to 50% of the market, and their browsers were almost entirely incompatible."

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"Days after declaring its intention to aggressively collect patent royalties from open-source distributors, Microsoft backed adding ODF (Open Document Format for XML), the document file format used widely in open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office, to a list of business standards.

Microsoft also said it will support Office 2007's default document file format, Open XML, for the list maintained by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) as well, according to a press statement."

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"For the long term health of the Web, the important thing about these technologies isn't where they come from. It's that anyone else is free and able to use them. (Use can involve reading, writing, sending or receiving. And it can involve doing these things or writing software that does them.) Some of the things this requires are..."

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