log

March 3, 2010

The Internet Explorer 8 Render Mode chart

OK, so Hen­ri’s IE8 ren­der mode flow­chart was a run­ning joke in the web­dev com­mu­ni­ty a year ago. Now it’s offi­cial (albeit a year late).

Two strange quotes in the MS arti­cle above made me wonder…

[…] many high traf­fic web­sites want to ren­der in as many browsers as pos­si­ble, which is why they write for Quirks.

Think­ing in terms of web-scale, there are bil­lions of pages writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly for either Quirks, IE7, Almost Stan­dards, or the lat­est Standards.

Seri­ous­ly, no one “writes for quirks”, espe­cial­ly for com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. One writes in quirks acci­den­tal­ly, or from lazi­ness, lack of knowl­edge, or pos­si­bly as a result of head trau­ma. Phras­ing it this way makes it sound like peo­ple inten­tion­al­ly choose to ignore the past 10 years of brows­er land­scape. Besides which, you can’t be “writ­ing for quirks” with 1193 errors on your front page.

The offi­cial blog’s word­ing always comes across as care­ful­ly phrased to avoid tak­ing blame or hon­est­ly admit­ting past mis­takes that lead to the cur­rent mess, fur­ther ruf­fling the feath­ers of the many pes­simist hawks sub­scribed to their RSS feed. And the fact this post comes a year after the pro­duc­t’s launch (when the offi­cial flow­chart would have been use­ful) is befuddling.