At first I was hearing that Internet Explorer 8 was supposed to be available for download by the end of 2008. Now I am reading that Microsoft wants to have 'one last beta release' to iron out any problems. While I appreciate Microsoft's attempt to release IE 8 with as little problems as possible I find myself eagerly anticipating the release to see how I can code my sites with just one style sheet instead of five. I also want to play with the new CSS Table feature that will now be supported. Another issue is supporting IE 8. At my work we support the latest release of the major browsers as we determine through Google Analytics data for our site (Firefox, Safari, Opera and Netscape) and one version back for IE. So here's the problem, we're gearing up for an entire redesign of our site in 2009 and I was hoping that IE 8 would have been released early enough to have good enough market penetration that we could support it when we went live with the new version of our site. Things are still in the planning stages now so it will probably all work out but as one of the two Web Designers there I am responsible for making sure we have a strategy for supporting the major web browsers and IE 8 throws an interesting curve ball into that equation. Basically, what do we do with late adoptors such as people who still use IE 6 in all it's buggyness? Or even IE 7 with it's incomplete support of CSS2.1 standards? My initial thought is to push IE 6 users to upgrade their browser to IE 8. This can be accomplished by adding a simplified style sheet that IE 6 users will see that will prompt them to upgrade to IE 8. They would not see the site as it was intended but would still have functionality. We would have to have conditional commenting to point to a seperate style sheet for IE 7, though.
As Web Designers we have an obligation to move the web forward and with the release of IE 8 this is a milestone that we should take a stand and make users upgrade their browsers to take advantage of the new standards. If all web sites did this we could move IE 6 to the scrapheap of old browsers and be able to code to the new standards that are supported in all the major browsers.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy targeting specific browsers sometimes to do cool things such as with my site
www.davidlender.com. But it would be nice to have one or two (conditional commenting for IE7) style sheets tops.
Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear when IE 8 will be released. Perhaps near the end of the first quarter of 2009.
