This is going to be one of the most linked to ALA articles and the source of controversy and dicsussion in months (years) to come.
http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype
There must have been thunderous complaints that Microsoft received from big enterprise clients. I do not see what else would drive them to look for a solution like this.
I read it twice and still can’t decide is this good or bad. On one hand, it is a way to prevent urgent evening calls from clients that some customers are reporting site is not looking ok. In the past, I frequently stated this is not a problem for me, but I can understand that it is not something everyone would accept.
It saddens me a bit that cleaning up the web will not be a viable future at all. If IE8 has gone fully standard-oriented, I assumed that in 8–10 years majority of web sites on the Internet would be standard-compliant. It might still be that way…
At least the basis (IE8, FF3, Safari 3) would be good.
I read this article twice also.
I understand that this is mainly measure for backward compatibility as well as option for keeping site rendering “correct” (which is time oriented verb — “correct” as “how author intended to be in time of creation”).
I hope that this won’t stop “standard compliant” route for any mainstream (and not only mainstream) browser software.