Update your site for Internet Explorer 8 …

Consistent with the effort to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to display content in its most standards compliant way by default (by default, standards mode pages will be displayed in “IE8 Standards” mode). Actually there is nothing strange in this practice because this is the typical browser behavior and therefore Internet Explorer 8 adheres to it.

However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This is the reason why Microsoft has created an IE8 Readiness Toolkit which targets developers and web designers, and should help them to get their sites ready for IE8. In any case in order to enable content providers to update sites with standards compliant content at a pace that best suits their needs and at the same time maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft also provided a compatibility meta-tag that can be used on a per-page or per-site level. By adding this tag IE8 will display content like in IE7.

As a site developer you can therefore choose to update your site to render in IE7 mode (by simply adding a tag) or you can test your site in IE8 standards mode to verify there are no display issues (typical symptoms of incompatibility with IE8 are misaligned page layout, overlapping of text or images and JavaScript issues or errors). You have the choice! Of course the best advice from my side is to start to test your site as soon as possible with the beta version of IE8 with the goal to make it compatible with IE8’s standard rendering mode.

This is a list of useful links you should consider as a developer/designer involved in making your site IE8 standard mode compatible.

· Compatibility Knowledge Base article: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/952030

· Internet Explorer 8 main site: https://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

· Internet Explorer Team Blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/ie

· Internet Explorer Developer Center: https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx

· Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit (for web designers and developers): https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/default.htm

Hope it helps,
Ken