Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware), acabou de publicar um excelente artigo sobre Padrões, IE(8), pragmáticos, idealistas e trotskyistas.

Joel foi muito didático em seu texto, provando que a (tardia) promessa da MS (IE8 finalmente respeitará padrões!) só criará mais problemas. Para ela própria e claro, como sempre, para seus usuários. O texto é longo, mas vale cada frase. Aperitivo:

Almost every web site I visited with IE8 is broken in some way. Websites that use a lot of JavaScript are generally completely dead. A lot of pages simply have visual problems: things in the wrong place, popup menus that pop under, mysterious scrollbars in the middle. Some sites have more subtle problems: they look ok but as you go further you find that critical form won’t submit or leads to a blank page.

These are not web pages with errors. They are usually websites which were carefully constructed to conform to web standards. But IE 6 and IE 7 didn’t really conform to the specs, so these sites have little hacks in them that say, “on Internet Explorer… move this thing 17 pixels to the right to compensate for IE’s bug.”

And IE 8 is IE, but it no longer has the IE 7 bug where it moved that thing 17 pixels left of where it was supposed to be according to web standards. So now code that was written that was completely reasonable no longer works.

A MS pagará caro por não ter respeitado padrões desde sempre. O problema é que todos os seus usuários, como contribuintes, acabarão arcando com os custos. De novo!