As Microsoft develops Internet Explorer 8, the idea of version targeting comes to the fore. Two articles from A List Apart, one of the premier web design web sites, ignites a firestorm, with different camps backing backward-compatibility, standards-compliance, and progressive-enhancement. Version targeting is introduced by Aaron Gustafson, and is seconded (surprisingly!) by the standards guru himself, Eric Meyers.
What version targeting allows one to do is to explicitly set via a meta tag or via the HTTP header what sort of behavior one expects from the browser on the client side.
Now, granted, I am not a web-developing professional. I am a dilettante. I merely dabble.
But this seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
We survived the post-Netscape 4 era without doing any of this. Obviously, there was a lot of website breakage, and companies had to pay web designers a mint to get things to work correctly with IE5 and 6. And then Firefox broke loose, quickly followed by Safari. And in the meantime, the wireless revolution was happening. Lots of breakage, much of it not really even fixed yet. There are still lots of popular sites out there relying on browser sniffing. There are tons more relying on the incorrect behavior of IE6.
This is not just an anti-Microsoft screed. The whole point of the Internet (which the Web is only a subset of) is graceful degradation. The idea is that things should remain accessible no matter how crappy your connection is. This means that you should still be able to navigate using Netscape 4 or IE 2 or even Lynx. This means that sites should be available just the same at 56k as it is behind a fat broadband pipe or a T3 connection.
I mean, what, are you going to target the iPhone browser now? That seems extraordinarily stupid.
You would think that web designers would be all for continuous breakage of web sites, considering that it would keep them in business. By the same token, I can only imagine the nightmare of wading through literally millions of documents written in bad HTML 4 with no CSS and having to convert that all to XHTML 1 and CSS 2. The number of mythical man-hours is staggering.
But that was the whole point of splitting presentation from content. The idea is that as more features come to the fore, you throw away the stylesheet but keep the XMLized data. In theory, if you were truly forward-thinking, you could just edit that one CSS file and not even touch any of the content. (Though, granted, how many sites actually keep this clean of a separation between content and presentation? Certainly, it’s probably not so great if you’re coding in PHP.)
The other thing that changes the picture is that Microsoft is the guy who is late to the party. While lazy designers working for the corporate hive will take the shortcut and code directly to IE6, everyone else is looking at the specs, both designers and browser developers. You don’t need a license for Win XP or Vista to use Firefox or Konqueror (which uses the same engine that Safari uses) and if you are so inclined, you can even contribute to these projects, whether it’s by checking in patches, or whether it’s just by documenting just exactly what is broken. The Mozilla Foundation and the KDE Project, while monolithic in scope compared to most open source entities, are still a lot more nimble than Microsoft. And it shows. In the time it took Microsoft to come up with IE7, Mozilla has churned out several versions of the browser suite that became Seamonkey (now at version 1.1.7), as well as the stand-alone browser now known as Firefox (now at 2.0.0.11.) There are now multiple web-browsers that use the KHTML engine, including the aforementioned Konqueror (at version 3.5.8), Safari (at version 3.0.4), Shiira (at 2.2), and Sunrise (at 1.6.2), and also the [Webbrowser for the S60][0] (which runs on Nokia phones.)
Say what you will, but it was these entities that helped drive the world towards a standards-based web. If it were up to Microsoft, we’d all be dealing with IE6 idiosyncracies instead.
That said, what we say probably doesn’t matter a whole lot to Microsoft. But don’t let it become standard. Let them do what they want. Let the rest of the web continue down this quasi-anarchic path, with the mantra of graceful degradation leading the way. So what if the web doesn’t look like how the designers intended. That was the whole point. The reader determines what it looks like, not the author. How very post-modern indeed.