Good way to garner some praise just before MIX08. Now we wait with baited breath for later this week, when news from MIX08 about IE8′s support of other standards (beyond CSS2′s Acid) will percolate up into the blogosphere.

Prediction 1: Web Development As You Wanted It To Be In 2004

IE8′s “super standards” will include not only vastly improved CSS 2.1 support, but support for HTML DOM Level 2 and fixes to a great deal of IE7- interoperable bugs in its JS and HTML 4.01 (<object> implementation, for instance) implementations. In “super standards” mode, I should be able to write a decent web application from 2004 by following web standards without a huge amount of IE-specific hacks – as long as I include the <meta> tag.

Prediction 2: Little Bits of HTML 5

IE8′s will support some of the new features of HTML 5 (probably not <video> or <audio>, but perhaps <canvas> and the DOM interfaces). IE8 will automatically go into “super standards” upon encountering the HTML5 DOCTYPE (as Chris stated).

Prediction 3: Who Needs Demand?

IE8 will ship with the Silverlight plugin automatically enabled. This will certainly drive penetration of the plugin, since even standardistas will want to install IE8 to get the good stuff we wanted 4 years ago. Who needs demand?

Prediction 4: If You Want XHTML, Go For It

I might be going out on a limb here, but I think IE8 might just support XHTML 1.1 (the MIME type and the XML strictness). This doesn’t hurt Microsoft’s strategy, really – since I don’t think a large amount of people will be that interested in XML-based HTML. I think documents serving XHTML will automatically be in “super standards” mode. I also think that whatever bits of HTML5 they support, it will also be XHTML5 support.

Prediction 5: Sorry Shelley

IE8 will not support SVG. I really hope this one is not true, but I can’t see that it makes sense for them to ship with support for the XHTML+SVG (+MathML?) mixed namespace nirvana until Silverlight has penetrated further into the web. Maybe they’ll do it in IE9 when the Silverlight functionality is native (ok, that’s a prediction for IE9…)

Thoughts?

There are, of course, many many unanswered questions… For those who can’t be bothered to read my whole post, please see the main point. For others with patience,

First, the basics:

1. IE8 will render existing content in either “quirks mode” (without a DOCTYPE) or IE7′s “standard mode” (with a STRICT DOCTYPE)
2. IE8 will use “super standards” mode if it sees a <meta> tag with “IE=8″ (what “super standards” mode entails is not entirely clear yet, but it should mean substantial improvement to CSS support at a minimum – I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fully compliant HTML and DOM2 support as well)
3. IE6 and IE7 will dutifully ignore the <meta> tag

Now what the above means is that if you’ve got existing pages that work around IE’s poor support of standards today that you need do nothing in order for them to continue to work in IE8. If you want to start coding HTML 4.01 for IE8 that truly supports standards you either add the <meta> tag with “IE=8″ or update your web server to serve it to IE.

It looks like this solution was developed in coordination with the the Web Standards Project. This article describes in more detail the rationale and intracacies of the solution. Furthermore, they “hope other browser vendors join Microsoft in implementing this functionality”.

Second, there is, as usual, tons of wailing and moaning and predictions of a web apocalypse, with many people yammering that this tag should work in the opposite way (“super standards” mode should be default in IE8 and all existing web pages would need to be updated to include a tag if they want IE8 to use the old IE7 “standards” mode).

Unfortunately, this suggestion has the potential to break pages for users. Let’s say your page is doing browser sniffing and if it’s Internet Explorer, you’re going to use attachEvent() instead of the standards-compliant addEventListener() which all other browsers support. If IE8 supports addEventListener() and no longer supports the non-standard attachEvent(), then guess what: your page is broken in IE8 “super standards” mode. Of course, there hasn’t been any mention of DOM-support from the IEBlog yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Call me naïve, but I intend to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here and say this was the best possible solution in a very difficult situation. I believe opt-in is the only possible solution Microsoft could have for existing content (read: HTML4). Hear me out, there are some important facts that aren’t widely known yet:

4. If IE8+ sees the meta tag with “IE=edge”, it will always use its latest, bleeding edge standards support. This will be useful for those sites which have zero IE-specific hacks, though Microsoft does not recommend it.
5. If IE8 sees the meta tag with “IE=9″, it will do “best effort”, which means IE8′s “super standards” mode
6. And most importantly: if IE8 sees a not-yet-widely-deployed DOCTYPE (like HTML5′s), it will use “super standards mode”

This last one is a big deal to all the wailers out there. This means anyone coding to new standards (like the newly published draft of HTML5) will not have to use this meta tag. Let me repeat that: If you want to start coding in HTML5, then IE8 will not require any <meta> tag. Ian Hickson and Anne van Kesteren might not yet be aware of this.

Some final notes:

7. other browsers will likely ignore this new tag too (at least indications are that Mozilla and WebKit will not)
8. IE10 will need to support IE7- quirks mode, IE7- standards mode, IE7 super-standards mode, IE8 super-standards mode, IE9 super-standards mode and IE10 super-standards mode – WTF? Chris does explain that eventually IE7 mode will have to go away at some point many years in the future when the amount of content has dropped below some threshold…
9. No official word yet on whether IE8 will support XHTML and its MIME type (but if it did, this would be a new DOCTYPE and would not need any <meta> tag). A year and a half ago, Chris told Mary Jo that XHTML would probably not happen in IE8 – but that was a year and a half ago…
10. No word yet on whether IE8 will support SVG (again, if it did, no need for a special flag to indicate “super standards mode”)

So all in all, the story is not so bleak. As HTML5 becomes the defacto standard of the web, IE8+ will not require any <meta> tagginess. I think the IEBlog should post a follow-up explanation with some of these facts (and more disclosure about what will be included in “super standards” mode). I wonder why Chris chose to post this just before his birthday, it certainly made his day off less enjoyable – unless he gets a kick out of all the bitterness and vitriol…

This is great news and it was something I half-hoped/half-expected. Now that this is official, I also expect an announcement that IE8 will support the W3C DOM 1 and 2, including Events. With both of those, people can actually create web pages that function across all browsers with only the occasional workaround. Web pages from 2005, that is. Too bad the first browser Beta will ship sometime in 2008. Sorry IE Team, you have to understand that you’ll be continuing to receive these digs until the browser ships…

There are some great questions and answers here that I recommend you read.

There are bigger questions still looming. It is well-known, if you had been following Chris Wilson on the HTML WG mailing list in the summer, that IE8 will only support these improvements in a special “opt-in” standards mode.

At the moment, most browsers support two modes: A quirks mode and “standards mode”. The IE team found when IE7 was released with some new CSS fixes that a great deal of web pages were “broken” and they refuse to do that again to customers. This means that any new improvements will be in another mode that web authors will specifically have to opt-in.

Now there is a great deal of concern about this mode. Personally I suspected something like IE’s conditional comments, however this comment from Chris Wilson makes me doubt that earlier assumption. He said:

more detail on “IE8 standards mode” in a soon-to-come post. And I think other browser vendors already DO support the behavior of that mode.

Does he simply mean that the other browsers already support the standards and features that IE8 will? Or does he actually mean that other browsers support the mechanism of opt-in?

The former is not big news, but the latter can be cause for speculation and is really good news. Is he talking about the HTML5 DOCTYPE (<!DOCTYPE html>)? David Naylor thinks maybe so. Or could he be talking about XHTML and its associated MIME type (application/xhtml+xml)? Nah, I won’t go that far

Another question: Any support for SVG on the horizon for IE8? Now that Silverlight is trying to make its way into the web, would it be strategically good for Microsoft to add support for an open standard for web graphics? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to add this feature in IE9+ to give XAML more time to nest? I certainly hope I’m wrong…

From the video:

• There was an interesting slip-up. The interviewer mentions something called “Triton” (he meant to say “Trident”, the rendering engine behind IE6 and IE7). The interviewer then slips in the fact that “Triton” is the codename for IE9 and that he’s going to leave that in the video (with Dean’s approval). Is “Triton” the name of the new engine? Does this mean that IE7 still uses Trident which now supports 3 modes of rendering? So much speculation…
• I’m also surprised that Chris and Dean both don’t know what the ‘X’ stands for in AJAX…