Internet Explorer 8, Version Targeting, and "The Dead"

In a recent article over at "A List Apart," my web design role-model divided people who build web sites into two groups-- the quick (those who understand web design standards and try to abide by them) and the dead (folks who still build web sites like they were done back in the 90's.)

Why is this important? Because Microsoft is working on the next version of Internet Explorer, and they are aspiring to improve the support for web standards in version 8 beyond the improvements we saw in IE 7. This is great news for "the quick"-- but not such good news for "The Dead."

You see, people who design/build web sites with a complete disregard for web standards can pretty much expect their web pages to fail when rendered in future versions of a web browser. They can be minor failures (i.e. things don't look right, but the sites still functions) all the way to spectacular failures. Microsoft, being sensitive to the needs of "The Dead", has adopted a mechanism called "version targeting" to try to address these concerns.

I should care . . . and I do care, it's just-- the official designers that I work with are (for the most part) still stuck in a "nested tables/IE6/presentation tags are okay" paradigm. I can't even get them to think about IE7 as a design consideration, and now I need to worry about the next version of Internet Explorer having "version targeting?"