Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

It's a new mode on top of the existing standards/quirks, likely triggered by a magic meta tag. The #html-wg discussion may be of interest.

I couldn't get the differentiation on your quote marks. However, from what I understand, IE8 will have a new "standards mode" that follows existing W3C standards. This mode will be opt-in (so old web pages relying on IE7- behavior will not break).

I wondered if the page at http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top had this magic meta tag; it doesn't. How did webstandards.org opt in? :)

IE 8 by default will render pages just like IE 7, bugs and all. But IE 8 will have some sort of opt-in mechanism to enable behavior closer to the standards. It's a new type of quirks mode.

And I thought "almost standards" mode was bad.

The HTML-WG link isn't loading for me, but I did some searching and found a Q&A that explains it. Well, except for what the flag is.

Could be worse, though. There are people on the Slashdot discussion who seem to think it's a mode that the end-user puts it into with a toolbar button or something.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx#6810394

Sounds like it's just a continuation of the standards mode triggered by strict doctypes wouldn't you say?

Mr. Naylor is correct, this is the same type of doctype sniffing that Firefox, Opera, IE6/7, and Safari all do already. There's no new meta tag. There is no such thing as a standards-compliant HTML page that doesn't include a doctype, so it makes complete sense to turn on strict, standards-compliant parsing only on pages that contain the correct doctype.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535242.aspx

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla's_DOCTYPE_sniffing

Ouch! Sounds like the IE team don't need to listen to the users, they just implement the standards. That is very cool.

So, a lack of dialog is not a bad thing?

monk.e.boy

If IE8 provides best-yet standards support for strict DOCTYPES, IE7 provides decent (not great) standards support for transitional DOCTYPES and IE6 dies a well overdue death, what is the problem?

Once IE6 is finally killed won't most of the headaches die off, at least to an extent? I know IE7 isn't perfect and I personally swear by firefox or some iteration thereof but at least they're getting there. SLOOOOOOWLY but surely.

The old quirks and strict modes of IE 7 will stay exactly the same in IE8. To activate IE8's standards mode you'll have to opt in. This will most likely be a special meta-tag and probably the HTML-5-Doctype as well.