Yesterday, before publicly announcing it, developers from Microsoft called me and others to let us know that IE8's version targeting will now work the same way other browsers work, i.e. advanced standards support will be on by default. Some people will say Microsoft caved; others, that they listened to public opinion; some may even buy the company's own explanation, which is that, given a company-wide reorientation away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability, "web standards by default" takes precedence over "supporting all those badly made websites that were created specifically to work in IE."