A few weeks back, along with many others in the development community, I wrote in response to Microsoft’s announcement that IE8 would implement version targeting, a means of back-dating a site so that it doesn’t break with new releases of the browser.

While my views expressed in Version Targeting: Defaulting to the Past to Spite the Future? were primarily favorable of the new technique, I expressed my concerns with Microsoft’s decision that IE8 and all other browsers to come would default to rendering as if it were the previous release of the browser if the meta tag, which looks like this:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=x;FF=x;OtherUA=x” />

was omitted, rather than in the current up to date standards mode. Perhaps the pressure of the masses in the standards community, Microsoft has caved and agreed that the default rendering engine of IE8 will now favor standards compliance rather than giving precedence to the fear of breakage. To quote their March 3rd press release:

Microsoft Corp. is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content — by default — using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability.

While their official position is that they have reoriented their company focus away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, a lot of us (those not so trusting), posit that they most likely just couldn’t stand up to the pressure coming from those aligned with the web standards movement.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what contributed most to their decision. Either way you look at it, progressive support for standards is a good thing. In the end, with IE8 now in public beta, it seems the IE team is finally looking forward like the rest of us, instead of shoving their proverbial heads up their own asses. Standards will be supported by default.

The topic of version targeting has been all the rage the last 2 days, following Aaron Gustafson’s article for A List Apart and Eric Meyer’s companion piece. IE8 has not only passed the Acid2 test, but in this release it will be taking a new direction on version control, allowing us developers to, rather than rely on the DOCTYPE declaration to attempt to keep our sites in rendered intact, asign a meta element with the browser versions for which the site was coded and tested against. This meta element would look like this:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

Of course, in theory, if all browsers adopt version targeting, you would be able to enter content=”IE=8, ff=2.1, saf=3.0;” so all browsers would perform as though it was the day you coded it.

The logic Microsoft uses to explain their reasoning for going this route in IE8’s development makes perfect sense:

We realized that “Don’t Break the Web” should really be translated to “Don’t change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed.”

The benefit, of course, is that if you code and test in IE6, you state this in the meta element or HTTP header, and the browser “pretends” to be IE6 and renders the site accordingly, behaving as the back version of the rendering engine would have. Great. So your code is locked in time, and no matter how many versions of a browser come after, your site will not break. It’ll look the same forever.

However, if you omit the meta http-equivalent, the browser just acts as the backdated version - so IE 8 will act like 7 and render the page using the IE7 rendering engine instead of defaulting to the current standards mode. Read the rest of this entry »

The web is a dualistic space that combines rhizomatic user navigation on the macro level with imposed hierarchy both in the markup and in the visual design. Unlike print design, in web design, all information, all content, is inherently weighted by it’s tag, making all h1’s, all h2’s, all paragraphs, etc. visually equal to others of its type. Thus, it is up to the designer to communicate order and hierarchy. Effective communication design for web must account for the user, who is only one click away from being somewhere else.

The user can travel throughout many sites, and many pages within one site, quickly and in innumerable ways. This infinite possibility on the part of user interaction is the very core of what makes web design different. There is no one path, and we cannot assume that every user has the same end objective. One must accommodate the meandering tourist as well as the user who has a purpose. Designing a website is about creating a visually meaningful way for the user to navigate to the desired content, browse, meander. And thus our approach to communication design must accommodate a user who has no inherent reason to stick around.

A web designer is not here to decorate the page, but rather to orchestrate the user’s actions. He or she is the architect that designs this structure and the content it holds with the purpose of making it not only accessible for many types of foot traffic, but comprehensible to the end user. Read the rest of this entry »

Accessibility for the web has become a hot topic these days as Target, Inc. finds themselves in the throws of a California court case for their lack of accessibility of Target.com. While Target’s site has undergone a lot of updates to become more accessible to handicapped users since the last time they were in court, on Oct. 14th a judge found that their efforts to date are just not enough. So how much is enough? Well, regardless of disability, a user should be able to navigate the site regardless of disability and reach their “target” objective - in the case of Target, that’s usually buying something (or emailing customer service, checking order statuses, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »