To anyone involved in designing with CSS and semantic HTML to support Web standards, Internet Explorer has been the constant thorn in our side. IE5, IE 5.5, IE6, and IE7 have been the seemingly endless source of a Microsoft-generated ocean of frustration:
- deviant box model
- DOCTYPE switching
- no min- or max- widths or heights
- no variable-opacity PNG support
- no SVG support
- inability to serve XHTML as application/XML
and the sad list could go on. Many of these faults have been addressed and corrected, but increased support has been incremental, over the last six or seven years. However, earlier this year, Microsoft announced that IE 8 passed the Acid 2 test, an important demonstration of supporting most key CSS properties. Yesterday, they made that good news quite a bit sweeter, by announcing that the default rendering mode for IE8 will be with their highest support of standards, which reversed a previous plan requiring designers to include special code in their pages to trigger IE8’s standards rendering mode.
See also Microsoft’s announcement.