Forecast Schmorecast: Microsoft Does The Right Thing

Just as with weather forecasts, sometimes technology forecasts go bad. In this case, I am pretty happy with the way things have turned out. It's going to get cloudy, and maybe it will rain here and there, but this will pass, eventually. The skies will clear, in time.

♪♫"The sun will come out, tomorrow"♫♪.

To recap, the browser wars of the 1990s brought a renewed focus on Web Standards and that brought out the shortcomings of Microsoft's long-dormant Internet Explorer. For years, Web designers and developers worked around issues with IE in order to get pages that looked right in that specific browser, and a tremendous number of sites and pages were built in this way. Under pressure from standards groups and a host of prominent Web gurus, Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7 which fixed a number of errors, but broke a huge number of Web pages. The problem was with the way IE had "always" interpreted pages, and how developers had worked around those issues.

You can go to a bookstore and buy a five year old HTML book that said if you type in "that" you will get a page that looks like "this". And it would, but not in Internet Explorer. Microsoft's new browser was better than IE6, in a technical sense. It was truer to the way the W3C said markup should work, and it was more like the best browsers in the world. But IE7 was only an incremental improvement, and it caused any number of problems as it encountered pages with various hacks and tricks and work-arounds. Microsoft now had religion, but if IE7 wrecked the Web, what would happen when a newer, better and even more standards-compliant IE8 was unleashed on an unsuspecting planet?

Back on February 20th, I wrote about Microsoft's proposed solution. They floated the idea of a fix that involved opting-in for better performance. Now, and forever more, developers would have to include a specific, almost-proprietary and otherwise-unnecessary <meta> tag in their pages in order for IE8 to use all of it's new and improved rendering skills. No books available today teach this method. No classes taught today teach this method. There would be a dozen years of material and tradition out there with no reference to this at all. But, if you knew about it, and if you included this <meta> tag, it would trigger the improved, higher-fidelity rendering performance everyone craves.

Well, apparently all of that is out, now. Microsoft will release a new Web browser the way everyone always has. It will include by default improved support for both markup and CSS and, yes, it will play Hell with pages designed with IE4's, IE5's and IE6's flaws in mind. We went through much the same agony with Netscape's Navigator, which stayed at version 4 for many years longer than welcome.

So how does this affect us? Well, we can be thankful the result is almost not at all. There are very few areas where we have hacked pages to act in ways they were not meant to. I am sure these things will be taken into account in the next design and templates. The news for us is mostly good, as pages will appear more alike in Opera, Safari, Firefox and (wait for it…) Internet Explorer. This is as it should be. ABC doesn't check how Grey's Anatomy looks in Panasonic and Sony and Toshiba televisions. Why should we have to jump through so many hoops testing in half a dozen browsers because someone made a mistake a dozen years ago and decided to go their own way for several years?

There is going to be some noise for a while. The situation has been likened to Microsoft ripping-off the Band-Aid™ instead of peeling it off. But that just means we are that much closer to the day when all of this is unnecessary.

April showers bring May flowers, we were taught as children. We may have a few more bumps in the road as I layer on ever more metaphors, but things are improving and one day we will look back at this time and laugh. There may be a little rain, now, but there won't be the storm I was worried about. Wear your galoshes and try to enjoy it.