Apropos Joel’s IE8 rant. He has a point. Standard compliance in IE8 will come at a cost. I’d like to side with standards, but I can’t ignore what’s going to happen out there in the field. You know, with people who actually use IE and can’t tell well-formed from creme suffle. Joel hits the nail on the metaphorical header. It’s a problem.
The thing is, in Joel’s world, IE8 has 98% market share and the Web is static. That’s hyperbole in the first degree. In the world we live in, IE8 is not shipping yet, will need years before it takes over IE’s diminishing market share, and the Web …. well, the Web is dynamic. It has time to adapt and it will use it wisely. Joel’s doom and gloom predictions are link bait, hence the absence of link.
Yes, some sites will be broken in the meanwhile, not any of the big ones, not any of the ones Joel’s lists in his rhetoric. Yes, some sites will be broken forever, no one will attend to fix them, and they’ll break on other browsers as well. This too shall pass. In the long run, ignoring the-world-is-ending prediction, standard compliance will play better for all of us.
That side, full disclosure. I’m going to hate cross-browser testing against two incompatible versions of IE, and I’d hate going back to fix code I don’t want to touch, and i’d hate that some of my stuff will break because I won’t bother fixing it. I won’t ignore the cost. But I don’t particularly mind if there will be a temporary glitch in the matrix that will send IE8 the way of Vista. If not for a better IE, at least for a better Firefox.
Either way, consider this an early x-mas gift from our friends in Redmond who need to win some open source brownie points.