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Microsoft cheats web standards once again

ie8-w-acidfrown1A day of mixed news today with Molly Holzschlag joining the Opera team  which is of course great news — and Microsoft’s reversing direction once again on the standards compliance of IE8. About a year ago, Microsoft announced that they would ship IE8 in standards compliant mode by default – apparently a huge step forward to the surprise and joy of the standards community.

Would IE finally join the ranks of standards compliant browsers and make our lives as webdesigners and developers easier and the end user experience so much better?

Sadly, according to the blog post titled “Compatibility View Improvements to come in IE8” by Scott Dickens – the promised default standard support will not be implemented as planned but instead IE8 will feature a ‘compatibility view’ button – allowing the end user the choice of opting in or out of standards mode. This setup in itself is a huge step backward but is unfortunately not the worst aspect here. IE8 will actively blacklist websites, domains including their subdomains when the ‘compatibility view’ button has been used and force IE7 rendering.

If this will affect you in your work – an absolute must read on this topic is this post by Mike Davies (isolani):
IE8 Blacklist: forcing standards rendering opt-in