IE8 Version Targeting causes quite a stir

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Readers of the venerable A List Apart will already have read about IE8’s new version targeting (and Eric Meyer’s accompanying opinion piece) — and the announcement has elicited quite a few heated reactions, collated here for your convenience:

Microsoft’s own announcement drew both positive and negative comments
Jonathan Snook welcomes the change
Anne van Kesteren is not a fan
A Mozilla developer chimes in
PPK defines the semantics
An official Web Standards Project statement on their involvement
Jeremy Keith thinks the implementation is broken
Andy Budd sees opportunities for other browser vendors
Ethan Marcotte read it two weeks ago and still can’t decide
Zeldman steps up to defend the idea
John ‘jQuery’ Resig thinks the new tag is worthless
Gareth Rushgrove tentatively approves of the change
Dean Edwards posts some pertinent quotes from the WHATWG mailing list
Roger Johansson doesn’t think he likes it
Rachel Andrew sees it as a backwards step
Safari say they won’t be implementing version targeting
Hixie thinks the move could be construed as anti-competitive
Lachlan Hardy thinks we should accept the inevitable
Mike Davies says it’s the end of the line for IE
Eric Meyer expands on his thoughts
liorean approves of the proposed approach
John Resig notices the solution to everyone’s complaints
A long and thoughtful piece from James Bennett
More thoughts from Ethan
A well-reasoned assessment from Shelley Powers

And finally…

The controversy as acted out by toy lemurs 😀

I’ll update this list as more opinions roll in — and, of course, please share your own take on the topic in the comments.