Ok, if you haven't heard it yet, the dev guys working on IE8 have just announced they have checked the code into source control allowing IE8 to pass the ACID2 Test.
As you can imagine, this seems to have created a massive buzz around the web. It's an important step to having IE8 "standard" compliant, though all it really means at the moment is that IE now renders a large set of CSS2 and 2.1 correctly AND handles errors gracefully. I'm sure there is still more work to go before IE8 fully supports the full set of standards (Pick a standard, any standard.. there are plenty of them..).
Interestingly, IE8 will need a special DOCTYPE tag to indicate it's should be processed in "Standards" mode. Why does it do this, it's pretty simple. It means IE8 won't break the web. It will continue to render everything the way it does in IE7.
What it means though. especially for all of us developers, we will now need to start paying a little more attention to web standards (By Us I mean everybody else, if you've ever worked with me or talked to me, I don't do web dev...), but hopefully, we won't need to write web sites differently for all the different browsers.
Anyway, after reading this, it took me a little bit to work out what it really means to me as a non web developer. The answer was actually really simple. I'll hear less complaining from web developers. This is a good thing. Second of all, the only web site that I've ever had trouble with in IE6/7 (Slashdot) may now actually render correctly. This is great as I can now enjoy reading their tripe and constant complaining the way it is intended..
