stephenwoods.net

Valleywag keeps trolling me. I can’t help it, they make up crazy non-true things and its like a traffic accident, I can’t tear my eyes away.

After reading the article on ala about IE8 I have to say I think that despite their insistence that the  IE=edge flag should not generally be used I think it is the solution for most developers. If you code to the standard you shouldn’t cripple your site by targeting an obsolete browser. The whole point of web standards is that a new browser, if it follows the standard, will not break your layout.

However, I don’t think the meta tag is a necessarily bad idea. I think most developers working on consumer-facing apps should avoid it. But there is a good reason to use it: intranets and other custom web applications. These are apps that are business critical, but delivered in an environment where IT can make requirements so that users can access internal apps. Providing a way of targeting a specific browser version makes sure that those apps don’t break when users upgrade their browsers.

I would hope that this will actually encourage more IT departments to speed deployment of IE8 if they can be sure it won’t break access to mission critical internal tools. This is great for us, the developers of the consumer web, because we can target our apps to the standard without fear of users stuck in ancient browsers just so they can use Peoplesoft. 

Hooray for openness! Yahoo has decided to support openID. This is great news for developers, OpenID and users. Simple login that isn’t controlled by one company is good for everyone. Of course, the way yahoo is doing it its especially good for yahoo, because with the y! userbase suddenly all having valid openID credentials yahoo will become the ID provider for a lot of sites.

I love the idea, I love that yahoo is going to be supporting them. But I hate the idea of calling them “midgets.” I get that it is supposed to be cute…but no major company is going to use a word like that!