Microsoft changes X-UA-Compatible Policy

You can sleep better tonight, Internet.

The topic of Microsoft’s proposed standards-avoiding behavior has been covered and argued by much better (and funnier) bloggers than myself, so I am going to keep this post extremely brief. I just want to share my extreme happiness today upon reading that Microsoft has reconsidered their position and now, by default, all standards-based web pages will render using the most advanced and strictest standards support available in IE8. Only those who want their sites to render using the IE7 engine will need to use the X-UA-Compatible meta tag or header. Microsoft announced their unexpected decision on IEBlog to much righteous rejoicing.

I’m very hopeful for strong standards support, finally, in Internet Explorer 8.

Update: As far as reactions go, the most clever I’ve seen so far was John Resig’s.

Update, February 13, 2009: Unfortunately Microsoft have decided to change their minds yet again, and some sites will render in IE7 mode by default. And standards support in IE8 is still comparatively very weak, and they want to declare their release final soon. They should just give up and use WebKit, right?

The link to my content on Pownce has been removed.