Pragmatic Internet Explorer Version Targeting
As you may have heard, the web — or at least the standards-based part of it — is in a heated debate over Microsoft’s recent announcement of version targeting in Internet Explorer 8.
I’m not going to discuss the pros and cons of this technique but I am going to show how I intend to put version targeting to use when, and if, it actually sees the light of day.
The plan
- Set the
<meta>element to IE=edge and allow sites to always use the latest IE rendering engine. - Include HTML comments instructing future, potentially unaware developers, that if a new version of IE breaks the site they need to change the “IE=” value to the last known working version. This should be only a quick solution until the site is properly fixed and it works in the latest IE version again.
- Use conditional comments if necessary which contain IE version targeted workarounds limiting the potential for problems caused by future versions of Internet Explorer.
What do you intend to do about IE version targeting?
Update: James Bennett has written the best article to date about this whole version targeting issue.