Web Standards on IE 8

Web browsers are the programs we use to view the internet. The most popular is Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), followed by Mozilla Firefox. IE is the commercially developed browser that ships with Windows, whereas Firefox is an open-source, community developed program that you download from their website. There are other alternatives such as Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, however they are only used by a small percentage of the internet-using population.

The job of a web browser is to display web pages. Different web-browsers display web-pages in different ways. Because of this, a group called the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) developed ‘Web Standards’ for browser developers and website designers to adhere to. The goal being that a website designer could write a website, and it would be displayed the same way accross all browsers.

Standards are a good thing. As a web developer, a lot of my time is spent making sure that a website looks and behaves the same way in IE as in Firefox. Getting a website to that stage usually involves concocting hacks and shortcuts to making the website work properly in IE. The reason for this, is that until now, IE has not fully supported web-standards.

In their most recent update, IE8, Microsoft claims that they have full support for web standards. This is, in the short term, going to be very painful for web designers. All the tricks and hacks we had to implement to make sites work in IE6 (the most popular version of IE) will become redundant, causing a lot of instability in our page layouts and designs.

Microsoft are trying hard to remedy the initial growing pains caused by introducing their new standards-compliant web browser. They have a ‘compatibility mode’ button which will display websites in non-standards mode so that old sites designed to render in IE6 will still work in IE8. They also have a list of extremely popular websites (like facebook and myspace) that will automatically be loaded in compatibilty mode. They’ve even gone as far as to make personal appeals to these sites to embrace standards.

As far as our clients are concerned, a quick line of code in the header section of their websites will have their sites running in compatibility mode.

Overall, the adoption of standards is a good thing. In the long term, this cuts our workload a huge amount. Rather than fire-fighting cross-browser compatibility issues, we can spend our time focusing on developing robust, standards-compliant websites.

There is something you can do to help make the internet a better place. Firefox has been supporting web standards for years. It is leaner, faster and more secure than IE. We wouldn’t have any of the problems above if more people used Firefox. Best of all, it’s free. My professional opinion as a web developer is this: make your life easier, get Firefox.