Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 - It's out.

IE8 is out and that means that I'm taking a break from the DrupalCon related posts that I have been (slowly) putting together to jot down some thoughts on what this means.

Putting aside the glossy new features and interface tweaks there is really only one thing that it should be judged by. Is it any good at displaying web standards compliant web sites?

IE7 was a move forward in the right(ish) direction by Microsoft to support web standards but adoption was a problem because it was seen by many to have 'broken' the web simply because it failed to support their website that had been written with poor, broken code that IE6 did support.

As if conditional comments aren't bad enough, we had all the crazy news last year from Microsoft informing us developers who actually cared about doing things the right way were going to have to put yet more 'junk' code into our pages to tell IE8 'yes, our site is correct thank you - so follow the rules'. Thankfully they turned around on that decision and the browser now supports web standards by default.

That hasn't stopped Microsoft from still trying to find a way to meet the demands of lazy developers who don't want to fix their code or worse still, don't care about the quality of their code, by adding a feature that lets 'broken' websites get rendered in the old ways.

All this is covered in this article by Craig Buckler. What I don't understand is why Microsoft is so unwilling just to move forward. Put all resources into making the IE browser the best it possibly can be. Put the onus of future-proofing development back onto the developers who need to sharpen up their act. Andy Clark makes this point brilliantly on his recent Boagworld podcast interview. In talks with Microsoft they challenged him to suggest to think of a better idea. Andy Clark makes the point that it isn't Microsoft's problem, 'It's a problem for developers and designers to get the sites to work in IE8 which would be doing things the right way'.

We agree. We've been future-proofing our code for 6 years and we regularly come across developers who can't be bother to learn what is basic stuff. Buy a Zeldman book and Microsoft - please put all your energy into making this and future releases of IE support all of the best features of CSS3!