Rawr dt isn't happy.

Yes, this is about the evil browser IE.

Microsoft's latest dodgyness with IE is introducing a new meta tag (or http header) to specify the rendering engine to use

Now the list of dodgyness
[list]
[*] It promotes unstandardness
[*] This is what the doctype is for, to choose quirks mode, standards etc
[*] Imagine if this was implemented back in IE2, IE would then include the engines for IE2-8, which is insane... imagine how hard it would be maintaining all these engines.
[*] Why update anything, just set your rendering engine to IE2 and forget about your website. (oh and forget about other better browsers) yay for killing progress
[*] This will kill new browsers (in the long term), because they not only have to implement the current standards, but the behavior of every older rendering engine to have web compatibility.
[*] IE8 won't support Acid2 on release, because the Acid2 site doesn't choose a rendering engine :---o
[*] embedded content, what happens if a widget is designed for the latest IE/Firefox/Opera, and then the host webpage is turned onto IE3 computability?, this just means developers will have to support rendering engines way past their time
[/list]


Links to blog posts which explain this issue way better than me
http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2008/01/22/meta-stupidity/
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0279.html
http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/meta-better.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/doron/archives/2008/01/whats_up_doctype.html


edit:

pft list bbcode broken

*me will fix later...