IE8 is going to implement a new version targeting system that is going to coincide with their new rendering engine which is supposed to be significantly better at web standards. The big catch is that in order to enable this you have to insert a meta tag in to the header of every single page you want rendered in standard’s compliant mode. – Source

The big problem with this assumption is that it assumes we’ve all been making broken sites just for IE, which as you can tell if you use IE on my site, many of us do not. Sure the IE has the largest usage percentage, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s demographic that’s worth caring about, hell here at bonta-kun.net our biggest browser is Firefox (43%), followed by IE (42%), with Safari in third (8%). The other arrogant assumption it makes is that you have time and the knowledge to go to every single one of your pages and add this meta tag to their header.

The best argument in favor of this is done by Aaron Gustafson of A List Apart (brilliant web design site). The primary ground his argument sits on is the idea that all browsers would use this meta tag to target specific browser versions to ensure that pages are rendered with the engine they were built for (neglect the fact that this would require a really flexible rendering engine or a pool of different rendering engines). The primary problems with this argument are:it assumes we care about the layout of old content (unlikely we probably only care about the content) and that doctypes are useless. Doctypes were designed to lock your page into a set of standards and that gives the browser the rules to play by, it’s much cleaner than this browser engine targetting non-sense.

I found an excellent blog post that sums up most of my points much better than I have so far here. The writer is a little more worked up over the matter than me, but his points are valid.

I found an awesome compilation of IE8 version targeting shortly after posting this article.