Joel Spolsky has an excellent write-up called "Martian Headsets" that explains why MS is damned either way on standards issues.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

It should be mandatory reading for everyone who supports web standards.

MS is in a lot of situations where they're screwed either way, but people tend not to feel sorry for companies with market caps over the quarter trillion mark.

Excellent? I much prefer Mark Pilgrim's translation:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/03/18/translation-from...

"Internet Explorer 8 includes a Compatibility View feature that displays Web sites that were created for older browsers as they were designed to appear. You can enable Compatibility View in Internet Explorer or on the Web server."

Thank goodness for that!

How about rather than asking web designers, server owners and IT staff everywhere to add some hack tag to their code, you force IE8 into compatibility mode unless a designer specifically enables IE8 rendering on their page by adding said tag? That mediates the issue pretty easily.

IIRC, they were originally planning to do exactly what you said, requiring a special tag to enable standards compliance in IE8, but there was a gigantic backlash from the web development and standards community.

Why? Because then we get nowhere; all the clueless web designers never find out about the special tag to make IE8 comply with internet standards, and continue making webpages for the broken IE rendering model for the next 10 years.

We need to make all those old websites break, because otherwise they'll never comply with modern standards. We need to have standardsbased rendering be the default because then the designers that test against IE8 will be making sites that work better with other browsers.

By forcing developers to realize that their websites are non-compliant (either from angry users or specifically forcing quirks mode) and by defaulting to standards-based rendering, we make the web design future a much nicer place to be.

Well... I see there is still a "method to enable Compatibility View for specific Web pages".

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Because by default IE8 will try to render sites in a standards-compliant way. If you designed your site to work around all the quirks, bugs and non-standard stuff in older versions of IE, then your site might not work properly in IE8 by default.

This is a good thing because getting your code to be cross-browser compatible should be a lot easier now.

Microsoft just does not want to leave behind all the people who worked hard to make their code work with their older, broken versions of IE.

I'm no MS fanboy but it seems me that IE8 is going to be a pretty big improvement. I hope. :-)

That was Microsoft's original plan. The web standards community pitched a fit, and MS caved.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#The_2008_Do...

It's good news IMHO. Either way it's an interesting sign of Microsoft's waning power in the browser world.

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Sorry, cross-posted.