[MTOS-dev] Declaring tested IE versions in sixapart-standard

[Niall Kennedy]

   Today Microsoft announced a new form of browser rendering in IE 8+  
based on the presence of a meta element in your HTML head. This new  
element will track the version of Internet Explorer tested by the  
template's HTML / CSS author and render the page appropriately. More  
details are available on A List Apart [1].

   So how does this affect MTOS? We ship a standard set of templates  
that may continue in active use beyond today's crop of browsers. We  
may ship a set of templates today, tested in Internet Explorer 7, that  
may look ugly or broken in future versions of Internet Explorer (8, 9,  
10, etc.). We can add a meta element to each version of MTOS to  
indicate our latest tests and protect users who might be less hip to  
changes in the world of (x)HTML, CSS, and web browser compatibility.

   Currently Microsoft is the only browser vendor publicly supporting  
this special meta element, but the list could expand in the future.  
For now I recommend we only target IE and its huge share of the  
browser market.

   The change adds a line to default_templates/header.mhtml at line 6:
"""
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
"""

   We just told future versions of Internet Explorer this page's  
templates were last tested in Internet Explorer 7. If one of our users  
knows what he or she is doing they can always change that value. In  
the future we would modify this value as we test compatibility with  
new versions of Internet Explorer.

   It is possible a sixapart-standard template will work just fine  
with Internet Explorer 8 when released, but we are communicating a  
last known test mode that will survive throughout multiple browser  
releases.

   Thoughts? Objections?


-Niall Kennedy


[1] http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype