According to this AP story, the new version of IE is finally going to adhere to the same standards all the other web browsers do.

This should make life a little easier for web designers.

customwire.ap.org

A couple of months back, when I was trying to put together my web site, with my very, very limited HTML skills, I spent weeks tweaking it, and kept checking to see how it looked in my broswer (Firefox).

When I finally thought I had it the way I wanted it, I opened it up for the first time in Internet Explorer and it looked awful. Nothing was lined up properly, the fonts were the wrong size, bits and pieces were cut off. It looked totally different than it had in Firefox.

I had to start over from scratch.

Dan Ladd
Day 6

There has been talk since IE 8 was originally announced of its standards compatibility. However, on closer inspection, IE 8 is require some IE specific standards to be set before it will render. Specifically, special DOC types that won't be recognized by browsers other than IE. IE, unfortunately, is still going to be a big problem for us web developers.

I am trying the beta...it has some great tools for web developers... of course nothing really works all that well right now....we will see after beta if it is any better.