Joel Spolsky recently published a very insightful piece called "Martian Headsets" (also posted here on fsdaily). The core of his article is about the standards compliance of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. IE8 presents a problem because, although it is pretty standards compliant, it renders a lot of websites quite badly. The IE8 team presented a controversial solution that would have IE8 render all pages as if it were IE7 unless the developer specifically told IE that it would render well under IE8. Web developers rejected this solution and the IE team reverted their decision. Joel argues that whatever Microsoft ends up choosing on this issue, it will be a bad choice because there is no right choice. I think that there is a third option. In this article I will present three changes that Microsoft could implement that will allow Internet Explorer 8 to be fully standards compliant and ensures that the vast majority of websites will work just fine.