No, really…stop laughing…they mean it this time. Honest. IE8 will be standards compliant.

Bwaa-ha-ha-ha! Oh, that’s rich! I can’t keep a straight face when I say that. Microsoft really must think we’re idiots. We’ve heard this tune before with IE7. Now we’re in a morass of backwards compatibility.

It would be one thing if Microsoft forced the upgrade to the latest version just as, oh, EVERY SINGLE OTHER BROWSER DOES. But they don’t. So I, for one, am dreading IE8 as yet another browser that I have to support. Build it for Safari and Firefox, and smile. Check it in IE and weep silent tears for the angel that just lost its wings.

Until Microsoft honestly and truly dumps their coprporate mindset of dragging the last 10-15 years of technology along with backwards compatibility because some fortune 500 IT department doesn’t want an upgrade is ridiculous. Nay, reCOCKulous.

Now, I hope I’m wrong. Let’s hope the 8th time is the charm.

I actually started this post for a reason. Ars has an interesting article on IE8’s standards compliance. Check it out here:

Wisdom and folly: IE8’s super standards mode cuts both ways

A client asked me the other day what web standards were and why I seemed to hate Internet Explorer so much.

My response was thusly given:

Web standards are an agreed upon set of rules. Like, we all agree that a square is a square and a circle is a circle.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tells us that we, the entire internet development community, do not know what the hell we’re talking about. A square is clearly NOT a square (not to be confused with a squircle). It is, instead, roughly defined a polygonally rendered object oriented box-like ActiveWidget that may or may not have four equal sides (except when rendered in quirks mode). For our own damn good they’ve unilaterally embraced and extended the standard (now called ActiveCube 2008 Professional Edition) to include a fifth side on certain occasions.

And at the end of the day, they’re still not going to draw the damn box on the screen, so we can all go fuck ourselves.