Snow-cones are being sold in hell and Internet Explorer 8 is going to be truly web standards compliant. One of those 2 statements can be verified and is true; can you guess which one it is? OK, all joking aside… here’s what gets me about this. Even though the coders on the IE Development Team have now got IE to pass Acid2 Web Standards Test (hooray & congrats!!), somewhere deep in the echelons of Microsoft Management, there was a discussion that went something like this possibly;

MS Supervisor: Ok, I know you guys are making just one version of Internet Explorer 8 and all that… but I think we need to offer 2 different website rendering engines! One with absolute web standards which won’t be active by default and one with our own version of web standards we introduced in IE7!

IE8 Developer: That’s a horrible idea. Those “standards” from IE7 are only a partial list of actual standards.

MS Supervisor: Uhmm… well it will help with backwards compatibility on older websites! Here.. drink this kool-aid.. you’ll feel better….

IE8 Developer: Hey wait a second…. you’re the same guy who insisted on multiple versions of Vista aren’t you!?

Ok, so maybe that conversation didn’t happen, but we did almost get stuck with 2 different builds of IE8 in one piece of software. Frakkin retarded if you ask me… how bloated do you really need your browser to be? But yesterday the IE8 Dev team posted on their blog (check out the number of responses! holy crap!) that it’s all fo’ sho’ happening, 1 version only, and the absolute web standards love is being shared sometime this year with a private beta test. Not sure when, but there will also be a public beta test this year as well which will be the real moment of truth.

Will the web development community finally rejoice or will we continue to revolt and be repulsed? Guess we just wait and see….