Web Standards Movement Surrenders

A List Apart has published an article in support of a versioning meta-tag to be used in IE8 that would allow web designers to target specific browser versions. Eric Meyers and Jeffrey Zeldman agree. I’m almost at a loss for words. Almost.

Robert O’Callahan points out the obvious future issues with this idea from the browser developer perspective. Didn’t take long for WebKit to figure that out too. At least some people have a sense of perspective.

Much of the argument is based on IE7 transition issues holding to the “don’t break the web principle.” Zeldman argues, with some effectiveness, that web standards won’t win advocates by breaking (already broken) sites and that the educated web designers should take on the burden of moving standards forward.

Me? I say break the damn web. Microsoft already broke it when they shipped a buggy browser. And now they want to break it again rather than face the music of the mess they made? Call me callous for not feeling sorry for them.

Allowing developers to stop the web in its tracks by tying designs to a specific browser version is a bad precident. Meyer’s says this isn’t browser sniffing and while he’s technically right, the feature will further justify designers targetting specific browsers. It’s the wrong message to send. I don’t care how you spin it, the message you send to all those “inept designers” is that they don’t need to worry about cross-browser standards. We’ve already excused them.

Chris Wilson on the IE Blog make the argument:

But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser? The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. ... In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way.

And that expectation was wrong. There we go. Now, let’s get over that and not have the web standards movement sacrifice its principles simply because some designers don’t care about the very medium in which they work.

Let’s use another example here—the JVM.

When a person downloads a new version of the JVM, they expect existing Java applications to keep running without modification, right? But what if the application developer used un-published APIs and exploited version specific bugs? Should there be an expectation by the app developer that newer versions of the JVM continue to have the same bugs and the same internal, un-published API?

I understand that this is a huge problem, not just for the IE team, but for other browser developers and web designers. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel that supporting versioning is the wrong direction for the future. It’s a ball and chain we’ll live to regret. It’s one thing if the IE team feels there’s no other way forward out of the mess they’ve got on their hands. It’s another thing for the web standards movement to endorse and excuse the sins of the past.