In what is probably one of the most fantastic bit of news to come out of Redmond in a long time, Microsoft has announced today that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.

Posted on the IEBlog, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for the Internet Explorer team explained that IE8 will still also render pages in an IE7 compatibility mode but that this mode will not be the default as they had previously announced. The decision to enable this mode will be left up to the developer of the website being visited, using an http header/meta tag.

“IE8 has been significantly enhanced, and was designed with great support for current Internet standards. This is evidenced by the fact that even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect. “Our initial plan had been to use IE7-compatible behavior as the default setting for IE8, to minimize potential impact on the world’s existing Web sites. We have now decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default in IE8.

While this change may require some work for developers of sites currently designed around Microsoft's previous rendering mode, the changes required should be minor and going forward will make the development of true standards based websites, that everyone can enjoy, much easier.

View: IEBlog
View: Microsoft Press Release