While I knew that IE8 was going to support the current set of web standards, Microsoft's plan to-date was to require web sites to add a special indicator to their HTML code that would "turn on" this support.

The result of that previous plan would have been a confusing mess of web sites, with many inexperienced web developers wondering why their sites did not render properly.

Also, it would have continued the practice of making old, outdated web browser standards the default experience, and once again the onus would be placed on users to figure out which browser to use for what site. 

This is going to be an exciting time for web developers, as they will finally be freed of the shackles imposed by IE6 and IE7 — as soon as enough people have migrated to IE8.

I've done some development work recently for the Safari 3.0 web browser, which currently supports many of the upcoming IE8 features, and it is just so incredibly liberating to use the new standards.

Features like rounded borders, multiple background images per object, CSS selectors based on attribute values, multi-column layouts, and much, much more.

The trick is going to be getting a critical mass of people upgraded to IE8 as quickly as possible.  Based on the adoption rate of IE7, that will be no easy task.  It was only within the past few months that I've noticed more people using IE7 than IE6.  Hopefully there will be a compelling reason to upgrade (for users, that is).

Here is a link to Microsoft's announcement:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-03WebStandards.mspx