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.
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.
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branchandroot
Standards mode
Date: 2007-12-21 19:10 (UTC)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.