At the end of last year Microsoft announced details of improvements to IE8’s compatibility view. It’s an announcement that went largely unnoticed until last week when a few rumblings could be heard coming from the web standards community.

To get to the bottom of this we need to understand the history. Back in January 2008, Microsoft explained via an A List Apart article that for web developers to take advantage of IE8’s new web standards rendering mode, they would need to explicitly add a meta tag to their sites. If they didn’t add the tag, by default their pages would render in IE8’s compatibility mode (how IE7 renders).

There was uproar and the web standards movement kicked up a royal stink, and rightly so! So much was the pressure on Microsoft, that they actually seemed to listen and change their minds. A couple of months later Microsoft announced that IE8’s default view would be the new IE8 standards mode.

Last week Mike Davies, in no uncertain terms, voiced his concerns about Microsoft’s ‘improvements’ to it’s compatibility view. These improvements include an option that allows web-savvy users to switch from standards mode into compatibility mode if a site doesn’t render correctly. In addition, for the not-so web savvy users there will be a blacklist of domains that will by default render in compatibility mode. This blacklist will be populated automatically by analysing what sites other users have opted to view in compatibility mode.

So, in theory, if enough users view your site in compatibility mode, you could well end up on the blacklist. How you get off the blacklist isn’t quite so clear. The only way for a web developer to preempt being added to this blacklist is to explicitly add the meta tag. Exactly what the standards community rebelled against last year!

Microsoft's problem

Like it or not, Microsoft dominates the browser market and have a massive user base - much of which consists of the corporate world where big business has invested serious bucks in Microsoft products for their entire business work-flow.

For example, I used to work for a government department that had invested many millions into an all singing all dancing website and content management system, all running on Microsoft technology. However, the content management system is so reliant on proprietary Microsoft technology that it only works in IE6 - it is completely nonfunctional even in IE7.

So who’s problem is this? Is it the CMS developers responsibility to update their system and make it compatible with standards based browsers, or is it Microsoft’s responsibility to provide backwards compatibility in their latest browser?

It’s quite clear what standards stalwart Andy Clark thinks of this:

"... what I really think is that if sites break in Internet Explorer 8, after you [Microsoft] have done everything that you can to make that browser the best that it can be, it really isn't your problem to solve. Instead it's a problem for designers and developers like me to solve."

My heart agrees with Andy but my head completely understands Microsoft’s concern on this issue. If they don’t provide backwards compatibility to their customers the only result will be companies refusing to upgrade (as has happened with IE7) or customers becoming disenfranchised.

But where does the blacklist come in to all of this? If the problem lay with corporate intranets and internal proprietary applications, then surely this blacklist serves no purpose whatsoever?

There must be thousands of websites out there - if not millions - that were built without standards in mind and have long since stopped being maintained and developed. These sites may be massively out of date from a technical point of view, but is that to say the content contained therein is any less relevant or important? Does Microsoft have a right to just “break the web” or does it have some kind of moral obligation to keep outdated and incompatible sites accessible to all?

Storm in a tea cup?

To be honest, it’s not even entirely clear what this blacklist (if it should even be called a blacklist) is for. Michael Bester points out that the compatibility list is only intended for high-profile ‘top 50’ sites, which would certainly exclude the many millions of outdated websites I just referred to. In which case isn’t this all a bit of a storm in a tea cup? But then if a site is in the top 50 and is being actively developed, then surely Andy Clark is right and it’s the developers job to make it work?

I don’t know? Whatever the impact of this supposed black list, I’ll leave it to the likes of Mike Davies and Andy Clark to argue the nitty gritty with Microsoft. For every-day web developers like you and I, our main concern is our clients today, their immediate requirements, and the tools we’ve got to work with right here, right now.

I’ve played with the IE8 beta and I’m very happy with it. If it encourages the corporate world to ditch IE6 then I’ll be doing back-flips of joy - blacklist or not!