After two days of commotion regarding the Internet Explorer team’s decision to include a standards opt-in in the next version of their browser, Mozilla’s John Resig has noticed something rather important in an exchange on IE’s Chris Wilson’s blog; namely:
Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5).
Predictably, yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft about the new standards opt-in switch has created quite a stir in the web development community. As I noted yesterday, the reaction from the other browser makers would be quite important – and it looks as if they’re not interested.
The Internet Explorer team announced today that we will have to opt in to using the improved standards support in future versions of their browser, by means of a meta declaration in the head of our documents:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
After complaints from the web community about lack of transparency in the development of the next Internet Explorer, and a little browbeating from Molly Holzschlag, Bill Gates says there is no “deep secret” about what they’re doing with IE, and the IE team have responded by releasing the detail we’ve all been waiting for: the browser after IE7 will be IE8.
Thanks.
Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, has revealed in a presentation at Web Directions South 2007 that the next version of IE will have a newly-written layout engine, as opposed to the fixes patched on for IE7.
The slides of the presentation are available now, and in an interview with Sitepoint.com he explains a little more:
After just recently writing a post on CSS3.info which praises the CSS Working Group for their interaction with and communication to the web development community, now I have to write one castigating Microsoft for doing the opposite.