Re: GUI Jwalk to Legasutie upgrade issues, URL caching, IE 11 compatibility issues

[John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It appears that Microsoft has abandoned their efforts to bend the Internet
> to their document mode solution for the evolutionary changes of Internet
> standards.

It seems to me that MS's "document mode" was actually not an effort to
bend the Internet to them, but a way to gracefully transition from the
Bad Old Days of IE to modern, more-accepted standards. That is, they
were trying to allow IE to modernize and rejoin the standards-based
Web community without abandoning the poor schleps who *did* tailor
their sites to the quirks of older versions of IE.

> Their abandonment appears to be in the form of defaulting IE11
> to IE7 standards.  It looks like it is not going as smoothly as MS hoped.

No. According to the link you provided, IE 11 is frozen at IE 10's
level of document mode support (because they halted development of
document mode at IE 10), but also adds (to the extent MS understands
and can implement) modern, widely accepted standards.

The only thing being abandoned is actually document mode itself, and
only then in the Edge browser, which is specifically designed to be as
standards-compliant as possible (meaning Edge is meant to support the
latest, widely accepted standards and kick old-school IE developers to
the curb). IE 11 remains as all-encompassing as MS can manage.

> https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/internet-explorer/ie11-deploy-guide/deprecated-document-modes

John Y.