>I don't agree at all with that.

Actually you do, but I've said in (my usual) roundabout way - so, let's clarify what I said with what I meant ;).

1) bashing them is justified by all those years of wild disrespect for standards.

2) they may try to do this as a negative proof-of-concept ("you see what happens when you force standards upon us - nothing works anymore... do we hear you begging us to go back to our old ways?"). This doesn't mean they should get a carte blanche to go back.

IOW, they may try to do this just to show that it won't work - but that doesn't mean they should give up. For once they are trying to do it right, and I really don't care if its for all the wrong reasons. They should still do it, bite the bullet and endure the storm - they've started that storm anyway.

>I think it's VITALLY important Microsoft produces a standards compliant browser even if it breaks page display. We can't keep running down this path of creating more and more divergent versions of IE that don't comply and work differently than all other browsers out there.
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>At some point or another we have to bite the bullet and pay for IE's sins of the past, and the sooner the better, so we can move forward.
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>IE's divergence in the past is the reason for most of the pain we go through in web development today and the sooner a more unified model arrives the better. It's not really an option going forward with the type of AJAX applications that are going to be built in the future.
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>And I believe IE 8 will include an IE 7 mode (it's there now) that can be used to deal with screwed up sites that do rely on IE quirks.
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>These days nobody should be coding to IE specific browser features. The target should be FireFox and then - secondarily - making sure the code works in IE because at least if you're going down that path compliancy is correct and for the most part even IE plays by those rules.
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>IE 8 Beta 1 is like any other pre release version of IE that has been shipped: there are rough spots especially in the rendering and the default CSS settings applied which results in often funky looking layout. Those types of issue are likely to be ironed out before release - they have been in just about any other version.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>>For years, people have bashed IE for not following standards. Now, when they say they'll do it, they get bashed again. Sorry, I don't buy his arguements, especially based on the early beta 1.
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>>To me it looks that he doesn't have much hope that RTM version can be any better - he does say there's no solution to this, that "the path has negative width". The problem is conceptual, implementation can't fix that.
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>>As for being bashed again, I think that that's probably justified - they're doing too little too late, and probably with the purpose to demonstrate that the standards cannot work. Of course, they have vastly contributed to the reality in which they now can not work. Which is why this looks like a self-fulfilling negative prophecy. Looks like "we know you won't like it whatever we do, so we'll listen to you, and when you don't like it will blame you for it".