Asymptotically Converging on Standards
Shelley Powers: Microsoft is asking us to declare our intentions, it’s only fair we ask the same of it. If Microsoft won’t meet us half-way–if the company releases IE8 without support for the HTML5 DOCTYPE or XHTML, and without at least some guarantee as to when we’ll see SVG in IE–then we’ll have our answer. It may not be the answer we want, but it will be the answer we need.
If Microsoft were to declare that the following were to be treated as equivalent, then a lot of the concerns expressed by the web community were to go away:
<!DOCTYPE html>
and
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
In the immediate term, it looks like it will be the case anyway. And the foreseeable future, this plan makes sense, as a long incubation period for HTML5 has always been the plan.
Furthermore, by taking such a long range view, there really is no need for XHTML support to wait for an immaculate conception.
The bigger issue is that actually talking appears to be against the corporate culture.