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The universe started in 1970. Anyone claiming to be over 38 is lying about their age.

I’m quoting way too much from John Resig, but his points about the IE8 backward-compatibility meta tag discussion are well worth repeating, and there’s also way more poignant than most other comments I’ve been reading today:

The end result will be one in which: A) You’re either constantly dodging mistaken bullets from the Internet Explorer team as the push out new releases or B) They’re not going to do as many, if any at all, updates to the browser out of fear of breaking backwards compatibility. Honestly, I assume that B is far more likely, therefore you can be excited about looking forward to future, static, bug-laden releases of IE in the years to come!

Frankly, it’s a worthy cause for browser developers to shoulder some if the burden of cross-browser compatibility by including the ability for new browser versions to act like their older counterparts. But do you really trust Internet Explorer to do this well for each consecutive version?

Will IE10 include four rendering engines with their individual rendering and security bugs packed into one bloated product? Or, as Resig puts it, will development and innovation simply halt (as opposed to their already quite leisurely pace) because it’s much easier than maintaining multiple different “browsers” at any given time?

John Resig has a nice overview of the upcoming Acid 3 test, which will designed to test browser compatibility with recent innovation in the world of JavaScript and the DOM. Of course, most browsers are nearing perfect rendering of the Acid 2 test, which stressed CSS support. Mostly, I wanted to post this absolutely extraordinary screenshot from Internet Explorer 7:

Considering that the reference rendering looks like this, Microsoft has some way to travel…

Smashing Magazine has an absolutely wonderful list of CSS techniques vital for any web programmer.