It seems that Microsoft have caved listened to public reasoning and web standards ‘mode’ will be switched on by default.
Microsoft’s forth coming Internet Explorer 8, which recently passed the ACID2 Test, have now changed the direction they were heading in the way IE8 will render web pages. Orginally IE8 was going to cater for existing web pages not conforming to web standards and offer a meta tag or other solution to enable it if required. Officially dragging IE into the 21st century by enabling this by default is definitely a step in the right direction and a statement of intent about IE8 from Microsoft.
