This would have been a repetition of the situation with IE7 which, while having fixed bugs from IE6, broke pages that used the IE6-specific hacks to work around its non-compliance.
This was especially a problem for offline HTML documents, which may not be updatable (e.g. stored on a read-only medium, such as a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM).
[3] In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element into the web page that triggers compatibility mode in the browser, using:[4] A newer version of the browser than the page was coded for would emulate the behavior of the older version, so that the assumptions the page made about the browser's behavior hold true.
Peter Bright of Ars Technica claimed that the idea of using a meta tag to pick a specific rendering mode fundamentally misses the point of standards-based development but positioned the issue as one of idealism versus pragmatism in web development, noting that not all of the Web is maintained, and that "demanding that web developers update sites to ensure they continue to work properly in any future browser version is probably too much to ask.
[6] The release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 revealed that many web sites do not work in this new standards mode.
The Internet Explorer team also tests the websites on the list for compatibility issues and removes those where none are found.