I am not a fan of Internet Explorer, never have been. And not just because I’m a web developer, because its a horrible browser. Things got better with IE7, it wasn’t as much a headache to deal with. When I started reading about IE8 it felt like IE7 all over again, I was excited, finally Microsoft may not have a completely worthless browser! And faster than you can say browser sniffing, A List Apart released this article about IE8’s new little meta tag “feature.”

Now I’m no web standards guru, but I know enough to know this is a bad idea. And it looks like I’m in good company. This is browser version targeting, for one browser. More work(totally unnecessary work) for Internet Explorer…again. Completely against everything web standards that I hold dear to my heart(which is pretty much forward compatibility).

What web standards means to me is pretty simple: Future compatibility and cross browser consistency. Standards is much larger than that, but those two ideas are what is important to me. IE8’s new version targeting breaks future compatibility, a web page will be eternally locked into whatever version it was designed under. Why then look to standards or forward thinking at all?

That is bad enough, but I believe the real reason for the IE development team to do this is much more sinister. They suck, they know it, and they are building a crutch into the system. A crutch that will cripple the web development community, good job guys! IE8 is supposed to be a standards capable browser, it is supposed to pass the Acid2 test, yada yada yada. If it is successful at these things, future compatibility should not be a problem. Opera, Firefox, Safari, and other good browsers rarely break web pages when they are updated. But if IE8 should somehow fall short and fall flat on its face( ahem IE7) the IE development team need their crutch.

New IE same old problems, bugs is the name of the game, and IE has a monopoly. With IE history of breaking itself and its websites I seriously doubt this version targeting will be immune. Even with version targeting new IE browsers will have new bugs and cute little quirks that will break old websites.

I believe the response that the IE development team is getting from this will decide whether this “feature” is included. Please IE development team, do it right this time, pretty please.