Up until this point, whenever I heard someone from Microsoft start talking about standards, I couldn't help but laugh while thinking of how badly IE has butchered them in the past. Standards compliance was somewhat improved with IE7, but it sounds like Microsoft has finally agreed to step up to the plate and make IE8's standards mode actually standards-compliant.
MS has fought standards-compliance as the rest of the world knows it for several iterations of IE, knowing that it would break a lot of old sites that were specifically targeted towards IE's faults. With IE8 they will admitedly break sites that do not specifically request a special http header/meta tag to trigger IE7 standards mode. It will be quite interesting to see how many sites this affects. I'm guessing a VERY large number.
Since some (but certainly not all) of the rendering differences between IE and standards-compliant browsers have been due to a certain degree of ambiguity in the W3C documentation, Microsoft's definition of "the most standards compliant way possible" may be far different than that of Firefox or Safari. It would be nice if they just used Firefox and Safari's interpretation of the W3C standards, but I'm sure that Microsoft will come up with their own creative way of interpreting them.
So kids, this is why you code to standards and make IE the exception, not the rule. For those who ignored the standards evangelists, let the fun begin...
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