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What you need to know about Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as a designer and developer
With the official release form Microsoft, the first question every has is, "Now what do I have to do to make my site work ?" This highly anticipated release has some good news and some bad news...
Download | Internet Explorer 8 beta | IE 8 Readiness Toolkit
On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) for developers at the annual MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft officially reversed its position on IE8’s default behavior with regard to its new standards mode. Unless otherwise specifically told not to, the browser will now automatically opt-in all websites to “super standards mode”.
The good news, at release IE8 will have full support for cascading style sheet (CSS) 2.1. For the designer and developer, this means better predictability when creating sites. The bad news for the designer is, the beta version at least, still doesn't support "opacity" (as most other browsers do) nor does it support alpha-channel transparency.
In the official statement, Matthew Lepsen from the Microsoft IE development team said:
"A lot of the end user or consumer features are not featured on this build because it really is targeted at the developers and the designers"
"There are not going to be huge landmark changes. We want to have continuity with the new functionality, so we don't want to shock our viewers with a whole bunch of changes."
Well, that pretty much says it all... no landmark changes! I guess hoping for CSS 3 support is totally out of the question for now.
So what does it mean to the designer and developer? At first glance it does have some significant features. The first important part is the "standards compliance mode":
- Standards-based developers will not have to add an additional header to their server or another meta element to their markup to realize the benefits of IE8’s new rendering and scripting engines.
- Any non-standards aware developers will need to be educated to either a) implement version targeting, or b) get their site compliant.
- Anyone using JavaScript that engages in browser sniffing will need to replace that for feature detection (and check their third-party code too) as many assumptions about IE’s scripting engine could be proven false in this release.
