A new debate has engulfed the world of web devel­op­ers, and as usual, it has some­thing to do with Internet Explorer. For the non-web-savvy, per­haps a bit of back­ground will help. When design­ing and cod­ing for the web, devel­op­ers have to test on a vari­ety of browsers, in order to ensure that the site is ren­der­ing prop­erly regard­less of what browser the user is on. This is nec­es­sary because despite the fact that there is a set of Web Standards, not all browsers ren­der con­tent in exactly the same way. Internet Explorer has long been a point of frus­tra­tion for web devel­op­ers, as it rou­tinely did not oper­ate accord­ing to exist­ing stan­dards. IE7 made big strides towards being stan­dards com­pli­ant, but this did not come with­out its own prob­lems. In order to account for incon­sis­ten­cies with ear­lier ver­sions of IE, many devel­op­ers use(d) hacks to get pages to work prop­erly. When IE7 came out, many pages using these hacks “broke” in this ver­sion, mean­ing peo­ple had to go back in and fix com­pleted work.

So that’s enough his­tory for now. The debate, which seems to have kicked off in A List Apart’s January 2008 Issue, is about Version Targeting, Internet Explorer 8’s “solu­tion” to this ongo­ing prob­lem. The short expla­na­tion for Version Targeting, is that unless it is specif­i­cally instructed to do oth­er­wise, IE8 will ren­der pages exactly the same way that IE7 does. To coun­ter­act this set­ting, devel­op­ers must spec­ify (through the use of a tag) that the browser oper­ate at its actual ver­sion (in this case, ver­sion 8). At quick glance, this seems like a solid solu­tion to the prob­lem of new browsers break­ing older pages. In real­ity though, it is some­thing that many devel­op­ers are extremely unhappy with, as it under­mines good prac­tices, includ­ing the con­cept of Progressive Enhancement. Additionally, the notion that the default set­tings are for older browsers basi­cally means that devel­op­ers have to do addi­tional work (in the form of adding tags) to keep pages cur­rent. When IE9 comes out, devel­op­ers will have to go back into exist­ing pages and update the Version Targeting from 8 to 9.

This is an extremely sim­pli­fied expla­na­tion of the debate. Many devel­op­ers have writ­ten on the sub­ject far more elo­quently than I could pos­si­bly do myself, and I urge you to take a look at both sides of the argu­ment. A great place to start is Monday By Noon, which has an excel­lent list of arti­cles for and against Version Targeting, includ­ing the orig­i­nal List Apart ones.