Bad Choices in Forwards Compatibility within IE

In the final throws of working on this website update, I had to go and test on different versions of IE. I knew a lot of things were not going to work in anything before IE (Internet Explorer) 9. Nevertheless, I needed something to show up for the poor folks still using a broken browser.

After fussing a bit with a post-process filter in Restlet, I adjusted the website to switch to the media type text/html when it detects any version of IE before 9. The theory was that I could squeak by and deliver hacked up XHTML to IE and get something to render. That theory was quite wrong.

See, folks, I use a variety of modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox), on a variety of operating systems (OS X, Android, iOS), on a variety of platforms (Mac, iPhone/iPod, Android Phones, Nook Tablets). Everything works the way I expect it except on Windows with IE. I knew that and I avoid bastardizing my projects just to make IE work.

The engineers that made IE made what I believe to be the worse decision in forwards compatibility I could imagine for any system that processes markup. Instead of just ignoring tags it doesn't understand, it automatically closes them and makes the child a sibling. This completely destroys any kind of forwards compability as the DOM used by the browser is now enormously different than expected.

For example, in my pages I use the HTML5 article structure. Whenever an article , section , or other such HTML5 elements occurs, such as:

<article>
<h1>Test Article</h1>
<section>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>In the beginning ...

in IE 8 or previous versions, you'll get:

<article/>
<h1>Test Article</h1>
<section/>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>In the beginning ...

As the containers are gone, the stylesheets won't work properly, and everything looks funny.