In a move that has pretty much shocked everyone (myself included) Microsoft are going to make Internet Explorer 8 “Web Standards Compliant.”

There will be two modes of operation for Internet Explorer - One of those will be the “Standards” mode and the other will be an “Internet Explorer” mode. The Standards mode was going to be one that web developers would have to explicitly specify when writing their pages, with the default being the broken Microsoft version. Microsoft have since announced that they are going to reverse this thinking and instead, by default, Internet Explorer 8 will try to adhere to web standards. This comes as great news (especially as a web developer myself) as maybe kludging our CSS and web pages so they don’t break Internet Explorer will eventually become a thing of the past!

This change has come about after Microsoft announced their intentions on making themselves more open to standards and the open source community. Is it time for me to eat my words? No, I think we’re still a little early into this new Microsoft philosophy before we can dismiss recent history. Of course, I gladly will, if that means we can all have better, safer software, with community support. [SHOW ME]