by Eric A. Meyer

As I read through Aaron Gustafson’s Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, my immediate gut reaction was deeply negative. The version-targeting mechanism Aaron described was just wrong, completely backwards, the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. Every one of my instincts, honed over a decade-plus of web development, was in opposition.

Why did I react that way? Partly because version targeting looked like the revenge of browser sniffing. True, before browsers supported standards correctly, sniffing was often a necessary way of coping with their incompatibilities, but it never really worked in the long run. No sooner did you finish uploading your script than a new version of an old browser came along to break it. The fragile, self-defeating nature of browser sniffing was one of the forces behind the rebellion that eventually brought standards to our browsers. And here it was, I thought, being legitimized and enshrined in the code base of a web browser.

Primarily, though, I was bothered by version targeting because it runs contrary to the principle of forward-compatible development. This has been the best practice of our industry for years now, a way-of-being learned the hard way in the browser wars. We develop with an eye to the future, using features that are widely and stably implemented and only adding “cutting-edge” features when they don’t impair use of the site—this last practice known as progressive enhancement. One example of this approach is the techniques described in “Going To Print", which add URLs in printed pages for advanced browsers but don’t prevent or break printing in less capable browsers.

With version targeting, the incentive to plan ahead, to be forward-looking, is almost entirely destroyed. Instead, the browser makes a promise to always be backwards compatible. In effect, version targeting is like Thus, as a developer, there’s no need to look beyond the current state of browsers. I can just assume that browsers will always support what I’ve done even if it’s the worst kind of short-sighted, browser-specific, who-needs-standards-anyway type of development possible. And as for the expected direction of browser support for CSS or JavaScript or HTML5 or whatever…who cares?

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ERIC A. MEYER
Founder of Complex Spiral Consulting
Co-founder of the microformats movement
Co-founder (with Jeffrey Zeldman) of An Event Apart

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