My post title may seem like a “duh” statement if you don’t know the story of IE8’s dubious new meta tag, where Microsoft intended not to support the standards in IE8 but required web developers to add a special tag in their web pages to opt into the standards.
It looks now like Microsoft has reversed its decision, thankfully, so that those who want the non-standard IE7 rendering have to specifically opt for it. Developers who simply create pages to comply with web standards will automatically have IE8 render those pages correctly. Sanity at last. This style is in keeping with the web browser and standards traditions that have been established since the dawn of the Internet – where browsers automatically opt to render the page as compliant with the standards as it can. This sane method is also in line with the IE detection code that Microsoft developed in IE6 and later, where developers can target code designed for specific IE versions. Now you can target code for IE6 and IE7, and know that the standard compliant code of the rest of the page will be used in IE8. That’s the way it’s meant to be.
Filed in Web Design, News, Opinion, Browsers.
Flora and Fauna Rocks 
The appropriate thing to do with non-standards-complying Microsoft is to put it out of business altogether. Be good to yourself and switch to Unix – Ubuntu Linux is perhaps the best user version, $8 at cheapbytes.com – and never have to worry about VIRUSES, SPYWARE or even SPAM* ever again.
* You get SPAM from all over the world because Microsoft can’t find all the holes in their sponge (Windows) to stop juvenile delinquents from invading your PC to collect it as a ROBOT they add into BOTNETS to distribute CRIMINAL ACTIVITY. Microsoft Software is a THREAT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY and MUST BE REMOVED FROM THE INTERNET. The sooner people ABANDON the hopeless garbage software from Microsoft, the sooner the criminals won’t be able to enlist their PCs to commit crimes, including Massively Distributed SPAMMING.
See the call for the removal of MS from the net at http://www.whatiwanttoknow.org/wordpress/2007/11/03/the-formal-call-for-the-removal-of-microsoft-based-software-from-the-internet/
See further remarks slamming Microsoft at http://www.internetevolution.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=182556
Of course, Microsoft will not even answer a question as to whether worldwide SPAM is the fault of their perviousness. Pretend everything’s fine while all the users suffer. I hope the next service pack they release requires using a minimum of a 5 GHz processor so that people will finally understand how clueless Microsoft really is. (Inasmuch as 5 GHz processors do not yet exist.)