John Resig: ‘Meta Madness’

OK, one more link on the version-targeting proposal, from John Resig (the man behind the very nifty jQuery JavaScript library):

So, with that in mind, why even the attempt at making this sound like a “generally beneficial standardization issue”? Why go through the song-and-dance? Because if it was called:

<meta http-equiv="X-IE-VERSION-FREEZE" content="IE=8" />

then developers would surely, excuse me, shit the bed in frustration over being forced to add markup just to make their web applications render in a standards compliant manner.

It’s easy for me to say, I suppose, given the nature of DF’s audience, but I’m more likely to deliberately start blocking traffic from IE users than I am to add this bullshit tag to my markup. I want IE users to switch to another browser, so the last thing I want to do is help Microsoft hang onto IE users who might otherwise be tempted to switch to a standards-compliant browser.

★ Tuesday, 29 January 2008