Others might talk about Microsoft's move to the clouds, but one decision MS made shows its feet are firmly planted on solid ground: IE8 will be standards mode by default.
This was a good decision, but it's also an ominous decision. Not a word on support for the XHTML mime type. With no clear idea of exactly what MS has planned for this release, I am forced to hold my huzzahs until we see what IE8 actually delivers. According to the ieblog report, IE8 will be one of the topics covered at MIX08. Perhaps we'll see the first beta release of IE8 this week.
To put this in perspective, Microsoft has just agreed to deliver what Opera, Firefox, and Safari have always delivered.
update One interesting thing about this announcement–the IE program manager announced the move on the ieblog, and Ray Ozzie announced it in the press release. Where's Chris Wilson?
second update Jeffrey Zeldman sounds like a man who put himself on a line that just disappeared.
third update I just sent an email off asking the opinion of someone who knows this stuff better than me what he thinks, but from web log entries for this site, based on the new MSIE 8.0 user agent string, IE8 does not support the XHTML mime type. I repeat: IE8 does not support pages served up with application/xhtml+xml.
Again, this statement isn't based on a confirmation from the company. It's a guess based on current web log entries reflecting the new user agent string for IE8, and matching a pattern I've seen with previous IE versions that cannot access this site because of the MIME type I use. I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong.
