Falling in with the prevailing theme of Developer Day, the advice is not in the form of search engine manipulation, nor high-risk SEO tactics, but rather is a focus on ensuring sites have a solid underlying architecture with a logical linking structure, clean markup, and quality content.

It was clear from the number of people in attendance at the Developer Day sessions today, that there is a healthy interest from the SEO community in addressing architecture-level issues, which I am personally thrilled to see. I was surprised to be facing a packed room (plus overflow) when I joined fellow panelists Thomas Deml (Senior Program Manager, Internet Information Services, Microsoft), Nikhil Kothari (Principal Architect, Microsoft),
Duane Nickull (Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems), and Jeff Pollard (Chief Technology Officer, SEOmoz, Inc) to discuss search-friendly architecture across the Microsoft and LAMP stacks, and some fantastic advice on using Flash and Silverlight while still offering crawlable content to the search spiders.

To anyone that was on the fence about attending SMX Advanced this year, I definitely recommend attending next year if you have even the slightest interest in the development side of search engine optimization. Even if development isn’t your cup of tea, there are also invaluable sessions on organic search, paid search, and the business of SEM.

The Root Cause

Well aware of the problems that IE6 and IE7 created for web developers, the IE8 development team took a hard look at the root causes of these problems. Unsurprisingly the core group of issues began with IE6; more specifically with the introduction of the DOCTYPE switch. The DOCTYPE switch was a method used by IE to alter the box model that is used in calculating the dimension and relative position of elements in a web document, depending on whether the page declared a DOCTYPE. If a web page declared a valid DOCTYPE it would be rendered in “standards mode” using the box model outlined in the CSS2 specification, otherwise the page would use the rather creative interpretation of the CSS2 specification employed by IE5.5. The intention of this behaviour was to avoid breaking the countless sites that were designed for IE5.5 (yes, it’s interpretation of CSS2 was that creative), while allowing developers to “opt-in” to the new standards mode.

Non-Standard Standards

The standards mode introduced in IE6 brought Internet Explorer’s implementation of CSS2 closer to the actual W3C specification, but introduced a new class of CSS peculiarities, many of which were hard to identify and would often result in drastic inconsistencies in web pages when compared to other browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari. This rose to a multitude of well-documented IE6 “CSS hacks” and the trend of creating a distinct IE6-only style-sheet which led to popular, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, belief that one had to design a web page twice: once for IE6 and once for everything else. IE6 had tipped the balance in favour of backwards compatibility.

Breaking Changes

When IE7 came along the use of CSS had become the norm and the adoption of web standards was continuing to spread, so IE7 was developed with more standards-centric approach, resulting in the first version of Internet Explorer that was in reaching distance of true standards compliance. However, this improved support came with a price, as many of the web pages that utilized the IE6-specific CSS workarounds were suddenly broken in this latest version of IE. Now the balance was tipped towards interoperability, at the expense of backwards-compatibility.

The Perfect Balance?

With IE8 well into development, things are looking good for this next major version of Microsoft’s flagship browser. With Internet Explorer 8 recently passing the Acid2 test, the IE8 development team proved that they mean business when it comes to improving IE’s standard’s compliance. They also learned from the problems that arose from the last two releases of Internet Explorer, and working together with The Web Standards Project, have come up with as solution that could provide that perfect balance between backwards-compatibility and interoperability with web standards.

The solution comes in the form of an IE8 specific meta declaration that allows a web developer to specify what rendering engine IE8 should use for a given page. This declaration will specify the exact version of Internet Explorer that the page is targeting, and IE8 will display the page using the rendering engine from that version.

meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />