I saw this on David Moulton’s blog and thought it was so funny I’d share it here on my blog. It’s hilarious!

Over on the A List Apart website, there are two very good articles on the topic of Microsoft’s news that IE8 will be built to web standards, yet will default to IE7 rendering without the inclusion of a bit of code in the head of your site, or the HTTP Header. In his article, Jeremy Keith argues that Microsoft’s plan is acceptable, with the exception of the default to the IE7 rendering engine. He suggests, that IE8 and future releases should default to their own standards compliant rendering engine, and then allow non-standards compliant websites to add the additional code to get the browsing right. In a sense, he’s got a legitimate point. There was a lot of talk in both articles about the idea of IE7 and future releases “breaking the web,” which Keith describes as “rendering some websites differently in one browser.” However, I think that it is a larger, more endemic problem. Microsoft, by choosing not to adopt a standards based approach from the beginning of the movement, has in a sense become the source of their own breakage. Web sites won’t work in a standards compliant browser like IE8 because designers and developers have been forced to break standards in order to render correctly in IE. In essence, Microsoft is afraid of fixing their browser, which was the real cause of web breakage in the first place. Wow. They’ve got to feel really good about themselves in Redmond. Keith has a very compelling point that is clarified by Jeffrey Zeldman’s article, which I’ll address in a minute. Zeldman talks about the two different types of web developers: the web-standards enlightened and the amateur or unenlightened. By defaulting to IE7 Microsoft has, in a sense, chosen to accommodate the unenlightened. I see this, as Keith probably does too, as a major set-back to the web standards movement and probably a larger objection than having to add a little bit of extra code to the head of my websites.
On the flip-side of this argument is what Jeffrey Zeldman’s article goes after, that is that even though we will have version targeting in IE8, we are also being promised a version of Internet Explorer which finally fully embraces web standards! Zeldman argues that this has several benefits for web designers and developers, including Javascript/ECMAscript use on sites. I actually really appreciated Jeffrey’s thoughts. He clearly identified the problem – that there are two different types of people building websites – and that it is unwise to “break” the millions of sites that have painstakingly hacked their way into rendering perfection in IE. (Well, maybe that’s not exactly what he said, but this is my blog and I’m going to paraphrase.) It also allows IE to render correctly, which might encourage standards solid development in the future.
In both articles, there is this sense that the version targeting will allow designs to work in any future versions of IE with fear of breaking every new release. In one respect, this is very enticing! People can protect their websites from future inconsistencies in rendering. In other respect, isn’t that what web standards is all about anyway? Isn’t the point of the movement to create a universal understand for web design and development? In a sense, version targeting is attempting to take the place of the very movement it’s promising to support. And, of course, this only helps in IE, and has no effect on standards embracing browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
All of this said, I guess I haven’t fully made up my mind. In my stomach, it feels like a bad idea. In my heart, I think it might be the best answer to this whole mess.

So I’ve been really delinquent with this blog thing and I’m going to be revamping this site a bit here and a bit there and start making more of a footprint on this thing called the world wide web. This site was originally built to get me a full-time job. Now that I’m a free-lancer and I have a business site (www.origencreatives.com) this site gets to become more of a play site for me, which I’m super excited about.
I’ve never been much of a blogger, so this is going to be an interesting diversion for me. To get ready for it, I’ve promised myself to post comments on other people’s blogs at least once a day as a part of finding my own voice. This is really interesting, as there are many great blogs out there spanning many of my various interests.
I realize that blogging is more than just putting your words out on the internet, but is dynamic and community inclusive. There is interaction in the blogosphere that makes it completely different than a static site.

Anyway, I’ll be working this up soon.

Unbeknownst to me, joshclarkportfolio.com was featured on webcreme.com on July 26th! WebCreme is a site that features beautiful websites from across the web. It was quite a pleasant surprise to find today. Thanks WebCreme!