I now understand the method you’ve employed behind your madness. I agree that it’s the best direction to take. I don’t suppose you could get someone to take a look at my other post about IE8 and the possibility of dropping PICS in favour of Content Labels

Perhaps you’d like to comment.

http://segala.com/blog/ie8-is-on-the-way-but-there-is-one-standard-i-want-it-to-drop/

When we launched IE7, it had such huge gains in standards conformance that it broke many pages which depended on bugs in IE6. We don’t want a repeat of that performance when we launch IE8, and it’s not really fair to blame the web page authors for having conformance bugs in their code. In fact, since IE5 as Paul said, we had two modes to protect people from being broken by future bug fixes, but many web page authors specified that their pages were “standards conforming”, even though they were written to depend on bugs. So, when a page author says his page is standards conformant, but the page depends on browser bugs, we were faced with 3 choices:
1) Don’t fix the browser, since that would break the buggy pages
2) Fix the browser, and try to ge the page authors to fix their pages
3) Introduce another mode per conformance level

In IE7, after consulting with all of the standards advocates and top web sites, we went for #2. But it was very painful for average users who had no idea why some sites randomly broke for them. And it was painful for web page authors who had to rewrite a lot of existing pages to use standards better. In IE8, we are going with option #3 — this puts all of the power in the hands of the web page authors, who can now rewrite their pages at their own pace rather than getting beat up by mad users.

The standards mode in IE is triggered by the correct doctype being included in the head of the HTML document. Developers who included correct doctypes and valid code will be the ones who are creating sites that will appreciate standards mode. Those who miss those details will most likely be providing sites that are not standards compliant and that do benefit from the more forgiving nature of the quirks mode.

As for users, they don’t get to choose the mode at all. Really this is a development, as any improvement in standards support in any browser is, for developers and I, for one, am very glad to hear it.

I think the correct rendering of the Acid2 test is a fantastic testament to the work the IE team are putting in now!