ie8 version targeting

[RuralWeb]

ie8 is just round the corner and will be far more standards compliant and has the potential to break websites with its version targeting system. Actinic websites come in all levels of compliance especially those that have been upgraded rather than redesign to take advantage of code improvements.

My suggestion is to include the version targeting code for ie8 so that site owners can tell ie8 what version of ie they want thier site to be rendered in. Version targeting details are changing as we speak but it would be nice have it considered needed or not.

[Duncan Rounding]

Very important point Mal - and I agree completely.
This needs to be built in rather than added manually into the design.

Heads up Actinic please....

[cdicken]

Interesting - thanks for posting this Mal.

Another option might be to use custom variables to allow people to select their own version targeting via 'Site Options'. I'll look into this further.

[jont]

more standards compliant and has the potential to break websites

It has made the dizzy heights of rendering the Acid 2 test.. a first for Microsoft. The whole rendering issue has been fraught for Microsoft with them originally claiming they did not want to "break the web" LOL.

If the site gets through Firefox & Opera etc it should be OK for IE8 .. unfortunately I wager a lot of Actinic stores are never viewed by the owners in anything other than IE so targetting would be necessary for them.

[RuralWeb]

I agree chris. Site optoms would be the best place with a default of ie7 and options down to ie5.5.

Its going to be the biggest change in 10 years ms are saying. I was listening to a podcasts today with the latest updates and they still have not 100% agreed on the actual standards they intend using yet so its css2.1 at the moment but who knows what it will be when its released butyou can be sure that becausethey are using ie8 as the default that loads of sites are going to break. We will see what the beta brings.

[Steve G Griggs]

IE8 Standards and compliance.

Is this Microsoft making up the rules as they go along or real standards compliance? They have always made up their own rules to suit themselves surely?
If everyone worked to a standard HTML, CSS, XML format there should be no problems as we would all have a target that we could aim at, not like trying to please different browsers that interpret the code intheir own way.
Surely we should all check that our e-commerce sites work in different browsers and not blindly assume all our potential customers use IE7? That assumption could lose us valuable trade. Test, test, and test again is my motto.

[RuralWeb]

they are playing catch up really. As jont says firefix is very compliant while ie6 and 7 are not really. After ie5.5 ms did nothing really with the browser ie6 was really a few patches and ie7 was a bit of a disaster. The ie team was disbanded after 5.5 so its been adhoc since then.

While they were sunning themselves the likes of ff over took them and are now getting more and more users. Safari now is increasing as it is bundled with iTunes for example so they have to make some big changes and jump ahead of the competion or they will loose out ( some on here will like that)

So originally they tried to make ie so that it would assume that a site was not compliant and render the site but that ment that when a pagewas downloaded each rendering engine had to be tried on the page which increased download times. So they have decided to ask webmasters to tag thier pages to tell ie which rendering engine you want ie to use. This I think is a good idea but many in the webdesign world don't think so but you cannot please everyone. In the long term it will improve the web but in the short term it will trash loads of sites. It may even kill off ie as everyone may move to ff - who knows? But the bottom line is its going to happen and as 75% of users have ie then you cannot ignore it ifyou want to stay in business with a site that is not standards compliant. The fix is simple to do if your site is not compliant so I don't see too much of a problem. If actinic do as cd suggests then those that kep thier software upto date will have no problem either. Users of v7 and below are most likely to have non compliant sites so they will need to do the fix manually. There has been lots of heated discussion for months on the subject but at the end of the day ms are the same as google - use them or go bust. Interestingly google is not compliant and looks crap in ie8