This has been all over the blogosphere in the past few days as the release of the new issue of A List Apart has generated quite a stir. In case you missed it, the articles in question are here (Aaron Gustafson) and here (Eric Meyer). While my initial reaction to this sides slightly with “bad idea,” the final verdict is something that will have to wait. Here are my thoughts:
Firstly, I find it encouraging that Microsoft is actively engaging the web development community (at least those in favor of, and pushing web standards). It must be stated that I was in the camp of web designers who were pleasantly surprised by the sweeping changes made to IE7. While it wasn’t all that it could have been, it was much better than I had expected. IE8 seems to be on much the same path. My fingers are crossed.
My two mild concerns about this idea of using meta-tags to basically target browser versions are as follows:
1. It requires that browser vendors make new versions of their browsers backward compliant. Maybe not so strangely, the only browser vendor in question is Microsoft, and while I have been more-or-less satisfied with their progress, I am just not so sure that they can be trusted to continually accomplish such a feat. And, just for the record, I have never bought the statement by Microsoft that it was unwilling to release a new version of IE for fear that it would “break the web.” And if I don’t by that, I can’t buy the idea that “version targeting” is going to in some way accelerate the progress of their browsers. Sounds like a plea for an out to me.
2. Tying into this idea, it really bothers me that the web community as a whole seems that it can’t be bothered (at least in the eyes of Microsoft) to neither write good, clean, accessible code nor create a fix when technologies advance (a proposition that is fairly easy if you write good code in the first place). This attitude has long been a problem with me. But alas, I suppose it persists in all industries in one-way or another.
So, at the end of the day, all this mainly amounts to good fodder. I will have to wait to see just how it effects my implementations, and the industry as a whole. Only then will I be able to tell if it is a good thing or not.
UPDATE: Here are some links on the subject that might be good to read up on:
Zeldman: In defense of version targeting