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This is BIG news, in my opinion. For those of you that haven’t followed the controversy surrounding the upcoming IE 8, here’s some background. In December, Microsoft announced that IE 8 had passed the Acid 2 test. This means that IE 8 will be as standards compliant as the other browsers. However, in January Microsoft popped our bubbles when they announced that IE 8 will NOT render sites in standards mode by default.Instead, we’d have to include a meta tag on every page where we want to tell IE 8 to render standards mode. This kicked off a firestorm of controversy in the standards world. Some said it’s a good idea, because IE 7 broke a lot of websites that were coded for IE 6. Others said Microsoft was throwing their weight around again. Personally, I was just happy to see progress when it comes to standards in IE. But then I thought, why doesn’t Microsoft make IE 8 render Standards mode by default, and then if developers still want to use legacy code for IE 8, make them put an extra meta tag in. Well, Microsoft just announced that this is their new plan. So this means, if you use the Standards document type, IE 8 will try to render your site according to the latest standards. I think this is excellent news.