Sunday, February 03, 2008
Version Targeting: the Answer to Web Site Compatibility?
by(Updated February 5, 2008)
Version Targeting is a mechanism conceived by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and recently submitted to the Internet Explorer 8 development team as a recommendation for their next browsing engine Microsoft to ensure greater compatibility among it’s future Internet Explorer 8 browser. The issue came about shortly after the release of IE7 when Web developers and Web site owners found their IE6 sites broken in IE7. The Internet Explorer team, with their mantra “don’t break the web,” decided that something must be done.
In short, version targeting for the Web developer entails locking-in a Web site by stating in the form of meta data the versions of browsers successfully tested at the time of the site being developed. In turn, browser vendors must allow legacy code in their Web browsers so that a site built and tested in IE7 but viewed in IE10 still looks and works the way it did in IE7. Thus, not breaking the web.
In a very “courageous move,” Aaron Gustafson of WaSP was one of the first to blog about Version Targeting and how it relates to forward compatibility and Web standards on a popular Web development site A List Apart and it definitely gave the Web development community something to blog about. Much of the initial public reaction especially on the IE blog was negative, stating that the addition of the version targeting syntax is just another proprietary piece of code to accommodate a company that cannot develop a standards-mode browser like Firefox, Safari and Opera, who have been constantly expanding their specification for years. I think developers are most upset about the idea because it undermines progressive enhancement and the fact that IE may be a monopoly now but may not be after a while. This is best summarized on an Anne’s blog comment.
As a Web developer, it is easy to be critical about this topic if you’ve been conditioned to practice web standards recommendations in your work for many years with the theory of progressive enhancement at it’s backbone. But some of these same developers and Standardistas including Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, widely known for their great work, are putting a positive light on version targeting and how it may be a more realistic approach to eventually keeping all the parties in the Web development game working together and more efficiently as the Web continues to change and grow.
Although I’m still a bit skeptical about whether version targeting is something I wish Web browser vendors would incorporate into their products, I’m willing to hear both sides for now. One point that stood out for me was found in the WebKit’s (Safari engine) blog on the same discussion of version targeting. In closing I’ll leave you with a quote from them:
“But locking in compatibility would mean you have to think about the compatibility profiles of old browsers a lot longer. And no one wants to think about the state of the engine in Safari 2 - I sure don’t! We made thousands of fixes and improvements and those fixes deserve to stick.”
