Dan Olsavsky's Blog

FFx3 is due to "flip the switch" sometime in November (the public release was on June 17th) and IE8 is scheduled to be released in Q4 of this year. Rumor has it that MS wants to release IE8 the same time Mozilla forces the FFx3 update. The bottom line is they will both be out and possibly widely used by the end of the year.

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, has released a statement that IE8 is going to Support Standards Mode by default. Many websites may display improperly in IE8 by default because many of us are used to programming for XHTML Transitional (instead of Strict), or in other words, we hack/tweak a lot of website so that they will work in IE6. Read, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx for more.

Furthermore, IE8 is not supporting all of the CSS3 functionalities and although MS claims IE8 will fully support CSS2.1, it doesn’t (at least for now). This is an issue that we should all be discussing now because it will affect a lot of websites in the near future. For example: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx, I know of several sites that I created that use this technique, that I will now have to make significant changes to for IE8 (in some instances this includes the design).

More IE8/CSS2.1 testing literature can be found here!

As one web developer says “At some point standards has to give way to usability.”, lol …try telling MS that! Standards Mode is here! This isn’t going to be a huge barrier for many of us, just a series of speed bumps. In fact, this will be a great opportunity for developers to make money. I foresee myself having to create a new style sheet for a lot of my sites, let’s hope it’s that simple.

Whats wrong in my IE8?

I am composing a list of things that IE8 doesn’t like. These aren’t all things that we need to go ape $h!t over yet as IE8 is still beta, but be aware, were only a few months away.

* IE8 doesn’t work with Multiple IE’s, IE6 or a stand-alone versions of IE7… so don’t install it yet if you plan on testing in older versions of IE

* IE8 doesn’t render anchor tags properly if you are using the CSS property display:block with background images (i.e. image sprites).

* There is an option in IE8 to render the page as if it were displaying in IE7… but it doesn’t quite work yet.

* The in-line attribute “border” must be done in CSS or the border will still show

* The in-line attribute “align” is giving me display problems, again, you may have to define this in your style sheet

* If you have an anchor tag wrapping around aH1-H6(etc), it will not display properly. Apparently, Heading tags can’t be links.

* Target=”_blank” is not working for me

* There are some issues with liquid layouts (it doesn’t seem to like percentages for widths on more than one column)

Some of these problems may be fixed but the Standards will stay the same.