IE Meta Freeze Issues

Being accused of complicating too many things in sites creating, the IE team provides some standartistas that should make our life easier as well as to help avoid such problems in next IE releases. A new meta tag with the browser version the site was built for was introduced.

Thus, newer browser versions will render documents according to the specs set with the referenced browser version in the meta tag. In other words, we just freeze web documents into a specific rendering mode of a browser version.

Here is quite simple syntax of this trigger:

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

Advantages

• It is a perfect solution for the IE team to make sure that if we render our documents in a specific version, these documents won’t break ever again. Thus, there are no worries about newer browser versions that can break your older documents. To upgrade documents for newer version you just need to change meta tag.
• The era of conditional comments referring to five different versions of a single browser is ended. You have one file to fix the bugs that makes things easier.
• All documents with no meta tag specified will get a default rendering. You also can render any version of the browser using special “edge” keyword. Thus, you can check rendering in all previous browser versions.

Drawbacks

• In case you don’t have the meta tag set, the default rendering will revert to IE7 rendering. Thus, the additions to newer browser versions won’t work unless the meta tag is specified.



• Anyway, the newer versions of IE still should contain the correct rendering of earlier versions. That may lead to some to unacceptable proportions. Of course, you can work with a separate set of rendering rules, but they cay be buggy too making things rather confusing.
• There is no good for people who have some other browser version than stated in the meta tag. Moreover, with updating their browsers often it can be a real problem.
• In case other browser vendors don’t accept this, it can be just another IE specific hack.

Some people can say that we should forget about unsavvy web developers and accept meta tag as something really great to live with. However, it is rather idealistic. Internet is not about web developers who build mean and slick websites. There is another big goal to achieve – web standards. Thus, IE can release its newer versions without breaking the web. Of course, meta tag is not a perfect solution, but perhaps, it is a good thing.

Reference: www.onderhond.com/blog/work/IE-meta-switch