IE8 News

[blufive]

After a long silence, Microsoft have finally started talking about IE8 features, and it's actually good news - IE8 internal builds are now passing the Acid 2 CSS test¹.

While many will hurl (not entirely undeserved) general derision in MS's direction for being the last of the major browser vendors to get there², the important point is they got there. The Acid 2 Test is eeeevil. This means IE8 has substantial and wide-ranging fixes to their CSS support (including, but not limited to, position: fixed, float/clear, margins, generated content, ignoring bad declarations, display: table and associated gubbins) and also fixes to more obscure bits of HTML like the object element.

IE7 had quite a few fixes to CSS support, and was welcomed for that reason, but still lagged a bit behind the competition. If IE8 is passing acid 2, that's a huge leap forward. Once this version hits lots of users (probably a good 2-3 years after they release it, at least) this will finally open up to general use several areas of CSS2 that are currently off-limits. Headlines: position: fixed (menus that stay fixed in the window while the page scrolls, without frames), display: table (table-style layouts without table markup), generated content (tricky to describe, but it allows all sorts of cunning stuff). It will also significantly reduce the pain of making float/clear work cross-browser.

¹Unfortunately, someone managed to actually break the main Acid 2 test site recently, but the powers that be are on the case, and it should start working again sometime soon.

²Out of the big four, Safari were first (internal build 27 Apr 2005, general release (v2.02) 31 Oct 2005) then Opera (public experimental build 10 Mar 2006, general (v9.0) 20 Jun 2006) then Firefox (semi-public dev build 12 Apr 2006, general release (v3.0) early 2008)

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Definitely good news. I suspect Molly Holzschlag's influence on the development team...

[whl.livejournal.com]

Note two things:
1) That is IE8 is "standards mode". I wonder what the default mode is, and how one gets to "standards mode"?

2) I went to the Acid2 page yesterday, with Safari 3.04 under Mac OS 10.4.11. The right eye rendered as a weird horizontal scroll bar, which seems to indicate that Acid2 is now broken, at least under some standard Safari installations.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

1) See my reply to thefalken's comments, below. I don't think it'll be too much of a burden to web authors (not least because most of those who care are probably doing enough to trigger it already)

2) that would be my footnote 1, above, I think. Rather unfortunate timing for the testcase to die. There's a mirror which should still work.

[whl.livejournal.com]

Ah, I saw footnote 1, but wasn't sure it was the same issue I was seeing. Looking at the mirror, I see the correct result, so it must be.

And so standards mode is probably triggered heuristically by proper code, or a standard DOCTYPE. I can live with that; as you say, most browsers have a setup for this.

From the way they phrased it, I was afraid it would be a setting 3 layers deep in the preferences tabs, or maybe a special DOCTYPE.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

well, to be fair, we don't KNOW that there won't be some special magic switch, but I'd be surprised if they do put one in, given how well DOCTYPE switching is currently working in the wild. It's feasible that they'll only trigger it on the "strict" DOCTYPEs, and thus miss out some of the sites that currently trigger Standards mode in IE7.

[thefalken.livejournal.com]

Sounds a lot like IE8 will only do the right thing if you put a special "Dear IE8, please don't be shit" bit in your web page though...

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

To be fair any document expecting to be rendered by the standards version should specify it's DocType in the page. All browsers have quirks mode for various broken forms of HTML.

[thefalken.livejournal.com]

But their talking about maintaining (broken) compatibility by default, so even with a DocType, it'll still have to default it whatever IE5 did...no ?

Standards mode

[blufive.livejournal.com]

No.

Pretty much all the major browsers (Safari, Gecko since $EARLY_VERSION (Mozilla/Firefox and others) Opera 7+, IE6+, even IE5 Mac (which pioneered the concept)) have at least two rendering modes - Standards and Quirks. If you show a few signs of knowing what you're doing (typically, put a coherent semi-serious DOCTYPE at the top of the page and don't completely flub the concept of properly nested tags) you'll get standards mode.

See my past posts on such things.

I wouldn't be totally surprised if IE8 throws another hurdle in there, but I suspect that all their comply-with-web-standards weenies (which they do have; IE6 was damn good when it was new, and IE7 was a significant improvement, albeit a hurried one that only hit the really annoying bugs) would fight tooth-and-nail to prevent it.

If there is any sort of change, I would guess that IE8 might flip over to the three-mode (Quirks, Almost-Standards and Standards) approach that the other browsers have been using for some time now, with the old IE7 "Standards" version becoming the new "Almost Standards", and an even-stricter standards mode only triggering on Strict DOCTYPES.

The changes necessary to make Acid 2 work will radically change the way IE handles Float/Clear, for starters, which is likely to make life interesting for people who don't grok how they're supposed to work, but just hack it until it looks good.