There is a pretty common problem when using semantic html and css for your navigation: having a little pause while the a:hover image is loading. Sure, it only happens once, but what if you’ve got several images for several different links? Let’s take the main navigation bar of my work site, grahamgilbert.com as an example.
As you may or may not know, the Internet Explorer development team recently proposed a new meta tag that will specify which version of IE your site has been coded for.
There has been quite a large uproar within the web design community, mainly since if no version is specified, the page will be rendered as if you were viewing the site in IE7 - which whilst not as bad as the steaming pile of dog’s doodoo that is IE6, it’s still not very good at rendering standards compliant code.
Personally, I think this is actually quite a good idea. Every time a new version of IE is released, many sites “break” since the designer has had to hack their code in various convoluted ways to get it to render correctly. This could put an end to all of this, with your site appearing as it was intended for all time (ish).
However, in my (admittedly half baked) opinion, there are two ways that this could be improved.
Firstly, there is the issue of the default being IE7. Supposedly the latest build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid 2 test. This means that for all practical purposes, it’s pretty much standards compliant (finally!). So why not default to IE8? That means that there shouldn’t be any need for conditional comments targeted at IE7 any more and will speed up development times when building your site.
Secondly, there really needs to be support with other browsers. I don’t see any point in saying “my site will work fine in IE7, but I don’t have a bleedin’ clue what it will look like in FireFox or Safari”. As far as I see it, the point of this tag is so that once the site is built, it will look all spangly forever. So, if you have to come back and change the site when a new version of WebKit or Gecko (the rendering engines for Safari and Mozilla browsers, respectively) breaks your site, you might as well fix it up for IE as well.
