Matthew Knott

The HTML equivalent of an Anderson Shelter, a meta tag that makes IE8 render websites in an IE7 compatibility mode, has been released by Microsofts Nick MacKechnie in his blog this week.

I'm not sure whether I should say "thanks for the heads up" or "why the hell should I have to?". I mean, my site is standards based, I specify my doctype, and there should only be one way of displaying that document.

So yet again, after spending years slowly adopting web standards, Microsoft has yet again come out with a version of internet explorer that adds their stubborn feature set, prioritised above features that make it easier for developers to develop cross-browser compatible sites.

I really did think that this was Microsofts chance to build on the progress they had made with IE7, but no such luck. A couple of months ago I tried out IE8, and when I hit IBM's W3 intranet, All I got was a little blue bar at the top of the page, and nothing else. The majority of sites I've looked at with IE8 do not handle well, so this meta tag is going to be compulsary.

Perhaps Microsoft should absorb the cost that will be incurred by local business to have this line of code inserted into every page of their website, there bust be billions of pages of markup that will require changing, so profitable times ahead for web developers.

Tags: Standards Microsoft Web_Standards IE7 IE8 Developers Selfish Doctype W3C Stubborn