IE8. Shot in the foot?
So it seems IE8 is petting the cat backwards already. Hakon Lie’s article bashes IE for its use of a broken page icon to denote standards compliant pages. This is a epic misapplication of an icon — but, is it truly a sign of Microsoft denouncing the use of Web Standards? No.
As Hakon says in his post, and others have pointed out the default is to render Intranet pages in “compliance mode” giving the option to the user to render all pages that way. So unless I’m reading things wrong IE8 will trigger standards mode for general Internet usage (i.e. what we really care about), and continue to let private corporate sites wallow in their IE specific non-standard muck.
My opinion is this would be a non issue had Microsoft decided to use a different icon. Either way I must agree with Snook in that it seems like a lot of fuss over nothing. The icon might be changed before final release, and even if it isn’t, the impact on the average user will be minimal. Let’s remember the the majority of IE users either don’t change defaults because they don’t know they can or are afraid to, or can’t because they are locked down on a corporate system. So, most people using IE would still see the work of people who care about standards in all most of its glory.
It’s all to easy to jump on the “let’s bash Microsoft” bandwagon, but that wagon is overflowing with zealots already, and it’s just not fun anymore. The guys in Redmond seem to be genuinely working hard to recognize and solve the problems they have, I vote to reserve judgement until the final release.
