Yes, that’s the sad truth, but before all guns are pointed towards Microsoft for this, I must say there are reasons the IE development team took this road. Their blog post explains this in detail (the whole backward compatibility issue, the state of things now, and the future support for standards). Although simply putting Internet Explorer 8 into a single standards mode was expected, they chose in the end to allow web developers to opt-in to the IE8 standards mode by adding a meta tag in the source of the page, which would explicitly tell IE to render the page with the “best standards compliance possible”. The default render mode is “quirks mode” (compatible with current content) and “standard mode” (IE7 standard mode).

Compatibility seems to have been the main reason for this kind of approach in the end, as roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in “standards mode”. A rather large discussion was spawned about this, so get ready for a few hundred comments to read. There are some really spot-on suggestions and ideas, and of course some (well deserved?) criticism. Well, at least they passed the Acid 2 Test.

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