Responses to the browser targeting debate.

Excerpt from Molly Holzschlag’s blog:read entire post here

If you work in Web design and development and haven’t read any of the articles and discussions taking place regarding IE8 and its use of meta versioning for standards compliance, it’s time to read up on it ASAP. Begin with Aaron Gustafson’s “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8” on A List Apart. You can follow the threads from there. Russ Weakley at maxdesign is keeping a good list of the conversations too, so you can drop by and fill up on all the mud-slinging and drama as it unfolds…

…Open standards must emerge from public, open, bare discussion. Microsoft clearly does not agree with this. It goes against its capitalist cover-up mentality, even when Bill Gates himself has quite adamantly stated that there should be no secrecy around IE8. In fact, he was the one who let the name slip…

…This shows you how ludicrous the lack of communication had become: Gates himself didn’t even know we weren’t allowed to say “IE8.”…

Excerpt from Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog:read entire post here

We knew when we published this issue of A List Apart that it would light a match to the gaseous underbelly of standards-based web design, but we thought more than a handful of readers would respect the parties involved enough to consider the proposal on its merits. Alas, the ingrained dislike of Microsoft is too strong, and the desire to see every site built with web standards is too ardently felt, for the proposal to get a fair viewing.

Excerpt from Eric Meyer’s blog:read entire post here

As the engineering staff at Netscape prepared a new release of Mozilla, the browser off which we branched Navigator, those of us in the Technology Evangelism/Developer Support (TEDS) team were testing it against high-ranked and partner sites. On a few of those sites, we discovered that layouts were breaking apart. In one case, it did so quite severely…

…The truth, of course, was that we were actually fixing something, and every other browser got this wrong. The truth was not relevant to our problem. It seemed we had a choice: we could back out the improvement to our handling of the CSS specification; or we could break the site and all the other sites like it, which at the time were many. Neither was really palatable. And word was we could not ship without fixing this problem, whether by getting the site updated or the browser changed. Those were the options…

…Looking back on it now, it’s likely this experience subconsciously predisposed me to eventually accept the version targeting proposal, because in a fairly substantial way, it’s what we did to Mozilla under similar conditions. We just did it in a much more obscure and ultimately fragile manner, tying it to certain DOCTYPEs instead of some more reliable anchor. If we could have given that site (all those sites) an easy way to say “render like Mozilla 0.9″ (or whatever) at the top of every page, or in the server headers, they might have taken it…