IE8 proposes to check for simplicity in stylesheets

Taking the Bridge pointed out a couple of weeks ago how Internet Explorer 8 being ‘the most standards-compliant IE so far’ could antagonise web developers: ‘The problem with changing how IE renders web pages is that with so many web pages already made, and so much of the population creating pages to render correctly in IE6 or IE7 all of those pages could break.’

The solution proposed is to send a meta tag out to IE8 telling it your stylesheets are clean. Otherwise it will assume that they are purposefully laced with hacks and revert to the iconoclastic layout behaviour of the earlier explorers.

I reflected on this, and on the fact that I typically add two or three rules to a site that are tailored to IE6, and perhaps one for IE7. I don’t think that I agree that this is a huge problem, as the ‘breaking’ is nearly always as minor as, say, the indent on a list-item being different between IE and the rest of the pack. This barely makes it into the category of ‘degrading gracefully’ when you think about some of the things that used to go wrong a few years ago. But perhaps my CSS is boring and simplistic and if I was a real web developer – check shirt, rifle and all – I’d be properly worried.

So while I’d prefer not to have to tell IE that I’m clean I don’t know whether it will make any difference, in practice; IE8 users will inherit the slightly wonky layout that would be created by IE6 or 7, and perhaps eventually I will stop bothering to accommodate it.

And of course the assumption should always be that the stylesheets are clean!