Strange and weird, but true! I was totally surprised yesterday to read that the upcoming version of Internet Explorer has successfully passed the Acid2 Face test. As you understand, these good news allow web developers to reasonably hope that IE will soon become (hopefully, in a few months) a standards-compliant browser.

Don’t get me wrong, but it sounds like a good joke to me; Internet Explorer becomes a standards compliant browser!

The important part of the official announcement is that “IE8 now renders the Acid2 Face correctly in IE8 standards mode”. You got it? IE8 standards mode; IE8 as every browser comes with two basic rendering modes: quirks and standards. In addition, IE8 provides a special mode called “IE8 standards mode” which is the only mode that successfully passes the famous test. The fun part is that “IE8 standards mode” is not enabled by default and it’s up to the web developer to enable it by placing a new opt-in flag in the head tag.

I admit that I don’t like the way IE8 works. I understand that it is partially necessary to provide support for websites that were built especially for IE6. On the other hand, the lack of such support would force the web developers to update such websites in order to work under “IE8 standards mode” and hopefully under any standards compliant browser!

To conclude, IE8 provides a standards compliant mode which successfully passes the Acid2 Face test but in the meantime encourages old websites to keep and maintain their IE6-only code! Someone could fairly argue that this is just another move from Microsoft in order to keep their browser share.