REDMOND, WA — The new public beta of Internet Explorer 8 is due in the Fall. Touted as the most strictly standards-compliant Microsoft browser to date, the product is eagerly anticipated by most developers, because ideally it will free them from incorporating workarounds in their code in order to avoid the current IE’s previously notorious idiosyncrasies.However, with increasing reliance on Web-based business applications and services that need to work across platforms and browsers, a number of companies and individuals have tailored their online operations to deal seamlessly with IE7’s idiosyncrasies. (The alternative would have been to instruct untold numbers of users in the fine art of tweaking IE7 to comply with global standards established by the World Wide Web Consortium. Generally, it’s easier for developers to tweak their products instead.)

Here’s where the situation gets tricky: In order to keep pages and apps from “breaking” under IE8, Microsoft already has designed a workaround for the workarounds that shouldn’t have had to exist in the first place.

According to an article in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base, if pages must be rendered exactly as IE7 would have rendered them, web servers can be set to send IE8 a special header instructing it to fall back to IE7’s rules. In cases where only a couple of pages require IE7’s rules, a META tag will tender the same result.

Note to developers: You have until the third quarter of 2008 before the public beta of IE8 is available, so it might be a good idea to start planning now before users hit your pages in droves and become frustrated. A not-ready-for-primetime “developer preview” version of the browser is available now to ease the re-coding pain.

Leave it to Microsoft to come around to the “browser-independent” school of thought just in time to make even that altruistic notion a headache.