Break Sites Now to Make Sites Later
How about rather than asking web designers, server owners and IT staff everywhere to add some hack tag to their code, you force IE8 into compatibility mode unless a designer specifically enables IE8 rendering on their page by adding said tag? That mediates the issue pretty easily.
They [Microsoft] were originally planning to require a special tag to enable standards compliance in IE8, but there was a gigantic backlash from the web development and standards community.
Why? Because then we get nowhere; all the clueless web designers never find out about the special tag to make IE8 comply with internet standards, and continue making web pages for the broken IE rendering model for the next 10 years.
We need to make all those old websites break, because otherwise they’ll never comply with modern standards. We need to have standards based rendering be the default because then the designers that test against IE8 will be making sites that work better with other browsers.
By forcing developers to realize that their websites are non-compliant (either from angry users or specifically forcing quirks mode) and by defaulting to standards-based rendering, we make the web design future a much nicer place to be.
You Can't Judge Your Own Project
On the launch of the excellent Ticketstumbler site:
I don’t think the creator of an interface can ever objectively measure the usability of the interface, no matter how much they use it; they don’t ever have to learn it, because they created it in the first place.
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I’m not saying usability is not the core. I’m saying that the creator of the interface is in no position to objective judge the usability because they have an innate knowledge of the system because they designed it and they know exactly how it functions and how it’s supposed to be used. If you want a real measure of usability, you have to get someone who understands the problem domain, but has never before seen your interface, and then objectively determine how easily they can figure out how to perform tasks and get things done. The fact that you, as the designer, already know exactly how the interface is built and operates precludes you from having an objective opinion of how easy the interface is to understand.
Similarly, a painting’s artist cannot objectively determine how beautiful/emotional/successful the work of art is, because he has an innate sense of what it is trying to convey to the viewers. Just because the artist sees the subtle details, nuances, allusions, etc, does not mean that other viewers will be able to glean the same information.
And to drive the nail home a third time, an engineer could not possibly be an objective judge of how easy a car is to operate (usability), because they already know where everything is and how it works. They need to have someone, without previous experience, sit in the seat to realize that putting the cigarette lighter and cup holders inside the center console is a bad idea and not at all intuitive…