The Great Version Targeting Thread

[Melrose]

after reading this article (http://alistapart.com/articles/minorthreat) by Zeldman, I thought I'd get everybody's feedback here.

This assumes you already know what Version Targeting is..

My opinion is that version targeting will help in the short-term, but in the long run it's not a good idea at all. Version Targeting will only serve to placate the developers who don't wish to be bothered authoring appropriate pages.

The whole idea of it is noble: Keep the existing website happy with incorrectly authored coding, but this flies in the face of anyone writing semantic, strict markup in the first place. By allowing sloppy developers to continue in their sloppiness, it serves to encourage and promote using bad code while penalizing those of us who know how to author correctly and take pride in our work.

Ideas?

[notnek]

It would be nice if developers got together and decided to build one webkit that every browser is built from. Then we wouldn't have to worry about pages rendering right and everyone could write nice, neat, strict code :-D.

[angelwatt]

I've read a number of articles on it and glad M$ decided to let IE8's default to be to treat pages in standards mode (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/13/microsoft.internet?gusrc=rss&feed=technology) (more recent article) and let the old pages add the version targeting. I never intended to use this as it's just another M$ band-aid as usual. I'll continue to code to standards and IE will eventually catch up.