[development] What does IE8 mean for Drupal?

[Victor Kane]

We need to clarify the discussion a bit.

The meta tag is more flexible, invoking IE9 or "edge" (IE1000), for
that matter, does not lock you into IE:

The referenced article points to something like this, which would be
cross browser compliant:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

Specifying the latest release of IE would get you out of quirks mode
automatically.

Reference 1 (the original  Aaron Gustafson article): A List Apart:
Articles: Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and
IE8  - http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

Reference 2 (Eric Meyer's take - read all through to the end!): A List
Apart: Articles: From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey
  - http://alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets

Notice that Eric Meyer's main point is that of initial gut reaction
against the Microsoft scheme to be adopted because it is "revenge of
the browser sniffers" (see Khalid's comment above "There used to be a
module for browser detection too.").

But he finally grudgingly comes around because it could be used as an
"anti-sniffer": allow people to adopt standards without breaking the
majority of non-standards compliant sites.

The only basic Drupal use case would be to allow people to specify
this meta statement for their site, which by default should be out of
quirks mode. Hopefully on a level higher than theme.

saludos,

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

On Jan 24, 2008 2:13 AM, Rowan Wigginton <rowanw at aspedia.net> wrote:
> Tony Yarusso wrote:
> > Am I correct in believing that other browsers choose the display mode
> > based on the DOCTYPE?
> >
> > I'm not a decision-maker in this group, but heartily against any
> > IE-specific changes in Drupal personally.
> >
> IE 6 and 7 have the same display modes as the other browsers (quirks and
> standards compliance mode) that's triggered by the doctype, it's just
> that IE8 will introduce a new switch that goes a little further than the
> current doctype. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype
>
> One potential problem I can see is that someone might create a great
> module that uses new features introduced into IE9 (a long way away). If
> Drupal core were to use this new module we would have to include <meta
> http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" /> to take advantage of the
> module's features. This would essentially lock the rest of Drupal and
> contrib modules into IE9.
>
> Would we simply ignore the module since it requires an IE specific
> feature (as in excluding 6, 7 and 8)? Or is there a fat chance of this
> scenario happening at all?
>