I’m following the (avalanche of) discussion around the proposed META version freeze of IE8. If you haven’t been paying attention, Jeffrey Zeldman and Jeremy Keith presents two different views of the issue and as such pretty good introductions. The short version is that in the future, all versions of IE will default to behave like IE7 unless you specifically tell it to act like a new version.

A couple of days ago WaSP posted a transcription of an interesting roundtable discussion on the issue, and although I don’t feel entirely convinced on it I still maintain my original feeling – the concept of a meta switch and its proposed implementation honors those who have built already broken websites for IE only while placing burdens on websites sticking to standards.

I’ve heard analogies to Word being able to import and export old .docs; you wouldn’t try to have word read a 2003 .doc using a parser designed for a 2007 .docx. Such comparisons fall short though, this is the web, we’ve agreed on standards. Microsoft have gotten themselves in this pickle by not conforming to the standards and I don’t think this switch where one has to specifically target versions of IE is going to help further exciting web development.

I’m with Opera’s Håkon Wium Lie on this one: Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers. The one in which I finally get into the IE8 discussion