ie 7 – Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage

In the past day I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading on what others think of this meta stupidity. A few suggested remedies are particularly good and worth a post linking to. My two favorites both from Mozilla hackers are these:

David Baron has a must read blog post. Since the bulk of these older sites are on intranets, why not just allow administrators to enable compatibility mode on intranets? Seems like a perfectly logical solution that doesn’t hold back the web, and allows them to achieve their goals.

Daniel Glazman has another idea that I think is very valid.

Microsoft should freeze, and I really mean it, its current IE6/IE7 HTML 4 engines, and drop that META tag idea.

Ditto. That needs to be a very deep and reliable freeze though.

As Robert O’Callahan, John Resig, Anne van Kesteren all point out, this idea of using a meta tag to select a rendering engine is bad. Here are my personal thoughts on the issue. Not as a browser developer but as a web developer.

Essentially the argument by the IE team is this: Rather than fix the problem, lets create a larger problem so the smaller one isn’t very noticeable.

Yea, that’s how I parsed the blog post. For anyone who disagrees, perhaps I interpreted it wrong because they didn’t select the correct parser because they didn’t include the following:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;raccettura=serious;OtherUA=4" />

All joking aside it’s an insane idea guaranteed to set things back.