Broken. Jeremy highlights the fly in the ointment: if you want IE 8 to behave like IE 8 (and not pretend to be IE 7), you HAVE to include the X-UA-Compatible header.
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Broken. Jeremy highlights the fly in the ointment: if you want IE 8 to behave like IE 8 (and not pretend to be IE 7), you HAVE to include the X-UA-Compatible header.
I think that's a big part of why reaction has been so negative: we all know we'll have to add the header. No-one likes being forced into a solution they don't rate.
The problem isn't that we have to add it, but that we have to continue adding it and updated meta elements (or HTTP headers) for each new release of Internet Explorer from verion 8 and till eternity.
If people wants to target a specific rendering engine, then they should add a switch stating this, not everyone else.
MS has two options to "not break the web": conservative features in IE8 or set the IE7 rendering mode as default.
Which one is the less bad?
If it is real a bad thing for you, you can set the default for all the pages on your server once and for all. With apache, you can add in a .htaccess, in your server directive or in your virtual server directive the following rule:
Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=edge"