The cool thing about Twitter is that it can deliver up-to-the-minute information from across the Internet. Mostly, this is mundane, random drivel regarding what people are doing. But it’s great when something happens, like a MacWorld keynote or some other global event. The tweets that appear become a gigantic discussion of what’s going on at the moment.

And so it began last night when I got a tweet from Dan Cederholm stating that he’s high-fiving the IE team.

This could only mean one thing and lo, it was true. According to this post on the IE Blog, Microsoft is reversing their decision on Browser Version Targeting. For those unfamiliar with what was happening, the gist was that with the launch of Internet Explorer 8, web developers would need to include a special META element in the header of their page (or deliver a comparable bit of header information from the server) to tell the browser which version the page was designed for. Developers would have a choice of nothing, a particular version, or the most recent version. However, this left the decision up to the developers and would required maintenance at times if a particular version of IE broke a particular feature that was being utilized. By not choosing anything, the browser would default to behaving IE7. This original statement from Microsoft caused an uproar in the web community and pro and con camps quickly formed.

I’ve been opposed to the idea of version targeting since I first read about it a few weeks ago. I also had a hard time grasping why some of the industry’s leaders that penned some of these articles were so gung ho behind the idea. Even after reading their pieces, I wasn’t sold.

That’s why today I’m very excited to know that IE is indeed moving in an appropriate direction by defaulting to better behavior and requiring developers to roll back to an earlier version (which is effectively what the DOCTYPE Switch does for older browsers:

Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager – Internet Explorer