Internet Explorer Still

You build your site to the spec. Valid HTML, clean CSS, following the actual standards. And then Internet Explorer shreds it. This has been the designer’s curse since IE decided to write its own rulebook back with version 5.5. Microsoft got to make up the internet, and the rest of us had to choose: build it right and watch IE butcher it, or abandon standards and hope IE happens to understand what you’re doing.

Microsoft’s answer to decades of this was not to fix Internet Explorer. It was to ask nicely. With IE8, they had a plan—if you wanted your standards-compliant site to actually display correctly in their browser, you just had to slip a little meta tag into your source code. A secret note to Internet Explorer saying hey, please behave. Chris Wilson from the IE team explained it this way: so many websites were built specifically around IE’s broken behavior that if Microsoft suddenly started following actual standards, all of those hacked-together sites would collapse. So instead of doing the hard thing, they made standards compliance optional, like it’s some experimental mode you can turn on if you’re feeling adventurous.

The problem is perfect: there’s so much garbage code out there that only works because IE is broken. Fixing IE would break all of it. It’s a problem they created, and their solution is to let it keep poisoning everything, asking designers to explicitly opt into not being broken.

I don’t know what pissed me off more—the original incompetence, the non-apology, or watching them turn standards compliance into a feature. They’re not going to fix this. They know they won’t. Ten years from now someone will still be choosing between right and working, building another generation of broken sites because one company decided standards don’t apply to them.