Microsoft’s Gift to the Problem They Made

Every web designer has a specific, personal relationship with Internet Explorer’s failures. Mine started around the time I learned what a box model was and discovered that IE had decided to interpret it differently from everyone else. Not wrong exactly—just Microsoft-wrong, which is its own special category.

The IE team’s blog post about IE8’s compatibility plans landed this week with the confidence only possible from people who caused a crisis and now expect applause for addressing it. Their solution: if you want IE8 to actually render your page according to international web standards, you need to drop a special meta tag into the document head. An opt-in for correctness. A please-behave tag. The absurdity is almost elegant.

IE developer Chris Wilson defended this by pointing to the real mess Microsoft helped create. For years, web designers faced a choice: build to standards and watch the dominant browser mangle everything, or build to IE’s proprietary quirks, abandon the spec, and at least get something functional in front of most users. A lot of people took the second option. The web ended up riddled with pages that only really work in IE—and if Microsoft suddenly started rendering things correctly, those pages would break everywhere.

So rather than fix the browser and let the broken pages fend for themselves, they’re protecting the broken pages and making standards-compliant designers do extra work to get what they should get by default. The ones who did everything right have to wave a flag to be treated right. The ones who built on bad foundations get covered for indefinitely.

I have no idea if they’ll learn from any of this in the next decade. My guess is they won’t. Not because they can’t, but because I’m not sure they want to.