Taking this announcement at face value (no pun intended), one might be tempted to think that Microsoft's browser development team has finally seen the error of its non-standard rendering ways. But... I've been verbally abusing Microsoft for a long time and can't just turn on a dime. I'm skeptical.
True, it seems that years of pressure and ill will over the debacle that was IE 6 have convinced Microsoft that it can't just run rough-shod over the W3C recommendations that standards based browsers follow. The IE 8 announcement makes some pleasing noises in this regard, but it seems to me that there's also quite a bit of tap dancing going on:
When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”
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