Just say NO to IE8’s new meta tag doctypes

Despite the current positive spin on IE’s new meta-tag doctypes, I couldn’t disagree more with this proposal.

By “best standards support”, MS really means “future proprietary rendering models”. No thanks. I’ll pass.

Originally, quirks modes were an ugly, but necessary emergency hack to get around years of W3C standards abuse. Mind you, I’m not complaining about it per se. Without the fervor of development activity we wouldn’t have the richness of content that we have on the Web today. HTML and the Box-Model were a simple enough problem that it tooks less than 10 years to produce a solid Web browser.

Now that we’ve learned our lessons, we shouldn’t continue to layer hacks upon hacks–let alone a proprietary standard on top of a proprietary rendering model. It is a wonderful example of “the wisdom of crowds” that the collective Web chose to abandon direct balkanized XML rendering with customized ontologies in favor of simple HTML and a sprinkling of Microformats. It is ironic and gratifying to see that the former head of IE’s core rendering engine (Hi @T) is now the leading proponent of POSH.

I’ll go further than Hixie and recomend that folks completely ignore this “feature”–it’s a trap. Modern standards-based web design is like golf. Know the lie of the land. Keep clear of the traps. Keep it simple. Shoot for par and don’t use more strokes (technologies) than you need to get the job done. Like Highlander, there can be only one Web.

Follow-Up: I am most certainly NOT recommending people avoid new XML-based standards for intra-app connectivity and data representation. I’m personally a huge fan of Jabber (now XMPP). Just try and keep further balkanization away from the Web.