I'm not going to worry about IE 9 until it comes out of beta, many things may change between beta and the final release, for someone like me it makes no sense trying to code against something that will probably change because my time is my most precious resource and I don't want to do the work twice. I imagine Artisteer also has to be careful where they put their efforts, though I have no doubt they will support IE 9 when it comes out.

Really the big problem with IE 6 and why it still remains in use in lots of corporate environments is because people built intranet apps using IE specific features and now it is difficult and expensive for them to rework those apps in a more standard way so they make their employees continue to suffer with IE 6 while the population at large has long since moved past IE 6.

I do see a potential for the same problems to come in the future because HTML 5 is still just a draft and not a final recommendation so browser vendors are doing their own thing to implement the things they think will be and want to be in the final standard. So it could happen again if people jump into building html 5 apps on IE 9 before the standard is finalized they could end up with apps coded specifically for IE that need a lot of re-work when the standard is final.

I think the IE team is trying very hard to follow standards and has hopefully learned form the past, but to me it would almost be better if IE 9 would not ship until after html 5 is a standard, but that is probably far enough in the future that they will not wait, because they are losing browser market share and other browsers are doing the same thing in terms of implementing pieces of html 5 they think will and should be in the standard. This is why the w3c is warning people that html 5 is not ready for production app development. Those early adopters who go full steam ahead on using html 5 will probably have a lot of work to do later. In some cases the additional cost of having to re-write apps later when the spec is final might be worth it but for small dev shops/teams it is probably better to wait. One can use the html 5 doctype with no problems but using new features of html 5 before it is a standard and while browser support is scetchy is something to be wary of in my opinion.

One thing I definitely do not want to do is use "very browser specific css" as Vince suggests. That is a huge amount of work and is like giving up entirely on standards and it is not necessary in my opinion. If you stick with xhtml (for now) and you do your design work in Firefox and Chrome (never ever design first in IE), then it is very easy to add css that is specific for IE to correct problems of IE that are not problems in more standards compliant browsers. You can use IE comment syntax as we do in mojoPortal to add extra CSS for IE versions to compensate for their problems, like this:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.mojoportal.com/Data/Sites/1/skins/mojo_v25/IESpecific.css" type="text/css" id="IE6CSS" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.mojoportal.com/Data/Sites/1/skins/mojo_v25/IE7Specific.css" type="text/css" id="IE7CSS" />
<![endif]-->

and we can add more conditions for other versions of IE if needed in the future.

Naturally if your client uses IE then you need to make sure you have done all the IE tweaks to make sure the design looks right in IE before you show the design to your client.

Best,

Joe

Rick, you might find this post from the Artisteer forums useful. I hope this problem with Artisteer is a temporary anomaly that will be corrected with the final version of IE 9. I was very happy to see that IE 8 made great strides forward in standardization, and am hopeful that we will find that IE 9 is as standards compliant as, say, Firefox or Chrome.

Jamie