I have recently started tinkering around with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta (IE 8) and noticed that the way it renders various CSS items has changes since IE7. I’m not sure whether some of these changes are due to bugs since it is in beta or whether it is due to Microsoft trying to better adhere to CSS standards (or some combination of both), but either way this perpetuates a problem for web developers who now must create new hacks for another broken version of Internet Explorer.
One problem I quickly noticed was that the navigation of a site I was working on was not displaying properly due to some bug with the way IE8 renders CSS (the navigation worked properly in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.).
Example of Broken Menu in IE8
I quickly started to do research on IE8 beta and potential bugs, but could not find anything concrete. Instead, what I did find was that the geniuses at Microsoft decided to add support for a special META tag that IE8 will recognize and use to control the CSS standards and rendering model used for a specific page. For instance, I could add a META tag to tell IE8 to use the CSS model from Internet Explorer 7 to render my current page — thus removing the need for another set of hacks (but at what cost?).
I decided to give this a whirl and try that same navigation item using IE7’s CSS model. I added the following line to to the top of my
section and tested the results:<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />
The following example was the result of the change in IE8:
Success! No need for new hacks or figuring out what was broken with IE8.
However, the problem is that this has the potential to retard web design in the sense that any page that uses this meta tag will be forever using an old deprecated method of rendering CSS. It freezes time, in a sense, for any pages that use this and makes an easy and lazy way to fix CSS bugs in old browsers without the need to understand or move forward with CSS usage and new methods and models.
Personally, I like the ability to trick IE into using the proper CSS model to make a page work. But, even though I’m not a web designer, I can see this creating problems down the road if designers do not work at making their pages display without the use of hacks and other workarounds — even if they are introduced and supported by Microsoft, itself.
