CivicActions

It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8:

"John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode.

"John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ .

A List Apart's Issue 253 continues discussing and debating the controversial IE version targeting that ALA announced a month ago. CivicActions blogged about this topic then too.

Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman provide very realistic and down-to-earth points of view and arguments both for and against version targeting. Although they each reach different conclusions, neither tries to persuade the reader one way or the other. Rather they leave you more enlightened so that you can make your own decision.

'They Shoot Browsers' by Jeremy Keith was better written in my opinion and has more convincing arguments, including this gem;

"The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches."

I'm still not 100% decided, but I'm pretty heavily swaying to the side against version targeting. Having said that, I can understand how and why Microsoft, even with mostly good intentions, came to this solution. I can see and appreciate the short term benefits, however I don't believe that Microsoft can pull this off in the long term. As web developers, we have no reason to believe that Microsoft is capable or even intends to follow through with it's promises

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 is an A List Apart article that was Slashdotted. It explains a new convention/standard designed by the Web Standards Project and Microsoft that aims to improve the support for old websites when new versions of websites come out. It introduces a new meta tag and http header that specifies what versions of each browser the page is compatible with. Such a convention would, in theory, ease the pain when IE8 is released and avoid the frantic chaos that occurred when IE7 was released.