[development] What does IE8 mean for Drupal?

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On Jan 24, 2008 9:14 AM, Victor Kane <victorkane at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

After all, it might be an IE only meta tag / HTTP header, since other
browser developers are not too happy with it, there are lots of
possible problems:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/01/post_2.html

So the FF=3, OtherUA=4 part there is simple speculation right now. The
Mozilla arguments are:

 - the browser needs to ship with multiple rendering engines for all
users (higher footprint)
 - an iframe in IE6 mode might need to communicate with a document in
IE8 mode (different APIs, different DOMs)
 - you cannot freeze the IE6 engine, you need to maintain it
"forever", because you ship with it, so you need to solve bugs /
security issues (which might break APIs)
 - also more attack possibilities since you have more engines installed

So it does not look like the other browsers are following suite.

Gabor