Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable.

Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, speaking at Open Forum Europe.

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

- Dean Hachamovitch on the IEBlog

This is great news, kudos to the Microsoft team for listening to the community and changing their approach.

(for more background see Jeremy Keith and Jeffery Zeldman's articles in issue 253 of A List Apart)

Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.

- Jeffrey Zeldman

Ben Henick has a new article over on ALA: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards. There are some great tips and hints here for those of you starting in web development, or those who are trying to break some bad habits gained over the years.

This one struck a particular chord with me, as it's something I've been trying to explain to clients for a while now:

Lesson No. 2: It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief... and possibly not even then

There are an awful lot of differences between rendering engines, and the W3C specs sanction those differences. You can adjust, tweak, hack, and waive, but if you want to preserve your social life, you will learn to let go of the small differences—and convince the stakeholders in your projects to do the same.

Amen to that!

Here's the IEBlog entry or just go straight to the download page. Ho hum, there goes the next couple of weeks while we get some empirical testing done.

Details of the CSS parser fixes can be found on the IEBlog here and here.

Update: a link to the release notes would probably help too.