Who loses out to X-UA-Compatible?

22nd January 2008

- 17 comments

If you work on the web you’ll probably have already seen or noted the existence of the latest issue of A List Apart:

My twitter feed positively exploded with negative feedback on this issue but I’ve only just got round to reading (and re-reading) the various interesting articles and (some half through through) comments. I though I’d have a think through who this affects.

What we’re disucssing is either adding a meta element to your documents or alternatively sending the relevant HTTP header. The code for that looks like:

IE Users

Users of Internet Explorer get a bum deal here I think. Their browser is going to get bigger – potentially a lot bigger. With all those rendering engines rolled into one it’s also likely to need lots of memory. How this affects the mobile version of IE is anyones guess. Memory and file size are even more important here.

Other Browser Vendors

I have a feeling they will all go Meh and move along as if nothing happened. Certainly my experience of upgrades to Firefox, Safari and Opera (including recent bleeding edge versions) doesn’t break any of my bits of the web or the bits I frequent.

Web Standards Savvy Designers and Developers

A really cool feature for us designers and developers has gone unmentioned I feel. We’ve been asking Microsoft for one application in which we can test all their browsers in. IE8 will be that browser. Think about it. By changing the contents of the meta element (or the header) we can trigger the rendering engine to use IE6, IE7 or IE8.

I’m a big fan of the whole progressive enhancement approach, using new browser features that not everyone supports (generated content, CSS3 selectors, etc.) in a way that they don’t affect older browsers. If I were to use a feature not yet supported by IE7 but expected in IE8 for instance in this way I would expect it work in IE8. If I include an IE7 X-UA-Compatible declaration this won’t happen. Which is why I probably won’t include one. The problem is if I don’t include it at all I still have the same problem. I’ll come back to the solution (and the problem with the solution) in a moment.

Other Web Designers and Developers

Not everyone is using Web Standards, and even less get progressive enhancement. Most of the web is broken and we are not going to fix this. Virtually no one thinks XHTML2 is a good idea because it starts with this fact and says “Let’s start again, but get it right this time”. The fact that all those websites (and more importantly for Microsoft the users of those websites) standardise on IE7 is fine by me. IE7 isn’t that bad remember.

So, all in all I don’t see a major problem for me, or other savvy web designers and developers. I have one issue; namely the strong language around the use of edge.

This option, though strongly discouraged, will cause a site to target the latest IE browser versions as they release.

What this is describing is how things work now. It’s also how I want to work – using progressive enhancement to make my websites better when people have browsers that support them. I’ll be adding the relevant edge headers to my sites by default as I get a moment to tinker.

In my view this should allow the web to move forward faster with newer features hitting IE sooner, leaving a ghetto populated by IE users who don’t upgrade quickly and designers and developers who don’t want to be professional about their craft (or tools that aim for the lowest common denominator). Yes, I’ll need to add a header to all of my sites in the future but in return I get the latest version of IE that lets me test all previous versions of IE.

Comments

  1. Yep – I’d agree with most of that. I think this is a good thing. It’s certainly going to make my life easier, as well as allow Microsoft to get on with developing their browser without fear of ‘breaking’ the web. This is hardly a shock either – anyone following the W3C HTML WG mailing list would have seen this coming. And as building any kind of consensus on that list is rather wearisome, I don’t blame MS for taking matters in to their own hands.

    I don’t know whether other vendors should follow suite, they probably don’t see much reason too – but my take is that, much like DOCTYPE switching did back in the day, this does solve a very real problem that we currently have.

    Andy Hume - 22nd January 2008

  2. Gareth, when do you expect X-UA-Compatible to become commonplace (or mandatory)?

    I’m all for anything that make it easier to target specific versions of IE. As a Mac user, installing multiple version of IE on Parallels and testing on them is a pain. My dream is to have an Mac native version of IE8, and a rendering engine ‘quick swap’ feature via a drop-down box. I can dream!

    I’ve actually suffered more at the hands of IE7 than IE6. My current site has a couple of nasty hacks in IE7 conditional comments stylesheets.

    Neil - 23rd January 2008

  3. From reading the article it looks like non-inclusion of the header/meta will result in an IE7 rendering – so I infer from that that you cannot reproduce an IE6 render (bang goes our all-in-one testing platform).
    My initial reaction was also along the lines of “bloated IE” and “what happens to pregressive rendering”, but it seems there are ways around at least the latter.

    Adam - 23rd January 2008

  4. [...] tiempo del ActiveX() y el document.all, desarrolladores como John Resig, Anne van Kesteren, Gareth Rushgrove o Roc (de mozillazine) que han tachado la iniciativa de inútil y perjudical para el desarrollo web [...]

    Internet Explorer 8.0 modo super estandar | aNieto2K - 23rd January 2008

  5. Works for IE, won’t trouble other browsers. Winner. I think the majority of haters maybe haven’t experienced commercial reality ground zero.

    However – more importantly – decent topical bracamp row to start?

    Skip Chris - 23rd January 2008

  6. [...] involvement Jeremy Keith Andy Budd Ethan Marcotte Zeldman defends the idea John ‘jQuery’ Resig Gareth Rushgrove Roger Johansson Rachel Andrew Meta tags: Development There are no comments [...]

    Pixelbox > Versioning for HTML, or Microsoft saving face? - 23rd January 2008

  7. @Chris My take exactly. John Resig has some great points about the whole thing. I’d only briefly considered things from a Javascript point of view but will be interested to see the solutions mentioned by Chris Wilson in the comments. Having your typical website frozen in time like it’s IE7 when released could be a good thing for data on the web.

    @Neil It’s exactly that sort of problem that this solution is trying to solve. But don’t think of this in terms of a way of targeting different browsers – that way lies madness.

    @Adam Maybe true, but that may help with being able to drop IE6 support in the medium term. I think Microsoft will do their best to kill off that browser as well.

    gareth - 23rd January 2008

  8. [...] Gareth Rushgrove [...]

    Dave Woods - HTML, CSS, Web Design > Will my site break in IE8? - 23rd January 2008

  9. I do think XHTML2 was a good idea. Sometimes it’s necessary to start again – as the people did in 1997/8 with Mozilla and as they should do with e-mail and also with IE. But I think it’s a horribly bad idea to freeze bad web design in the client engine.

    wortwart - 23rd January 2008

  10. [...] Who loses out to x-ua-compatible? [...]

    Max Design - standards based web design, development and training > IE8 and versioning - very worrying developments - 23rd January 2008

  11. [...] Zeldman steps up to defend the idea John ‘jQuery’ Resig thinks the new tag is worthless Gareth Rushgrove tentatively approves of the change Dean Edwards posts some pertinent quotes from the WHATWG mailing list Roger Johansson doesn’t [...]

      IE8 Version Targeting causes quite a stir by Mandala Air - 24th January 2008

  12. [...] read Who loses out to X-UA-Compatible? over at Morethanseven while this post was in draft and was surprised by the similarity to this [...]

    Signals from Mars > Blog Archive > IE8 and Version Targeting: Who Really Loses? - 25th January 2008

  13. I just read your post while I was writing my own on the subject and we seem to not have similar positions but similar thought processes as well. I hadn’t really thought in depth about the benefit to us developers if MS starts producing new IE versions with all the old engines built in but I’m all for anything that simplifies browser testing.

    Jamie Strachan - 25th January 2008

  14. [...] del ActiveX() y el document.all, y desarrolladores como John Resig, Anne van Kesteren, Gareth Rushgrove o Roc (de mozillazine) han tachado la iniciativa de inútil y perjudicial para el desarrollo web en [...]

    Tecnología AMPM | El blog de AMPM Soluciones que repasa las noticias más relevantes del rubro > Internet Explorer 8.0: modo Super Estandar - 28th January 2008

  15. > By changing the contents of the meta element (or the header) we can trigger the rendering engine to use IE6, IE7 or IE8.

    I don’t think IE 6 is an option. Thankfully.

    pauldwaite - 20th February 2008

  16. XP SP3 is not upgrading to IE7 and continue to use virtual pc or something like that to test your design in IE6 with lots of pain.

    araba - 6th May 2008

  17. Nice article, I am really get tired with IE6–7. Its my dream IE8 will be %100 w3c compatible and all IE users are upgraded to IE8. :)

    e-ticaret - 22nd May 2008

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