Project Spartan policy on backwards compatability

Question

I originally posted this to another Microsoft forum (but the system won't let me link it, so just google a random sentence below if you want to find it). I guess it can only really be addressed by someone on the Spartan team or up their line of supervisors
and a Microsoft Support Engineer suggested I post here instead. So:
Hi. I'd like to know if Project Spartan's backwards compatability policy will be different from Internet Explorer's.
Microsoft's general policy seems to be to go to great lengths to preserve backwards compatibility. (Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing has some great war stories about this.) For example, an IE 3 (Aug 1996) JavaScript quirk was that an array with a trailing
comma was longer than one without. [1].length != [1,].length Changing this behavior to match other browsers and the ECMAScript standard would possibly break JavaScript that had been written to depend on it, so it still exists in in-use versions of IE.
I understand why this policy exists and has been such a valuable business policy for Microsoft for decades. The situation is a bit different with a web browser, though, because the majority of third-party authors have to be compatible with browsers from
multiple vendors rather than a single Microsoft platform like embedded browsers or locked-down corporate intranets (not that those groups are tiny!). The other browsers have a different policy and will break backwards compatibility to better match the specs
(whether explicit or de facto). So the code I write to create websites quickly turns into “this works everywhere, except where you need this IE workaround”. I regularly encounter IE-only behaviors and bugs that I expect never to change, like recently finding
that only IE is case-insensitive when scrolling an HTML5 page to an in-page identifier or anchor from the URL fragid.
I've read a lot about the quality improvements planned for Spartan and I look forward to seeing a lot of these hairy old cross-browser differences get reconciled. But as a longtime developer I know no software is perfect and there will always be bugs. So
my question is: will this be a one-time fix or will there be a new policy towards backwards compatibility? If it's the former, Spartan is the new IE, and I know this tune very well. If the latter, there's a little room for hope that it will be pleasant to
work with.
Thanks for your consideration, and good luck with your code.

Answer 1

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