Jeffry Zeldman on WebDesignInterviews.com:

…what’s really going to drive standards awareness in the next months is the release of IE8. For the first time, IE will no longer support “IE-only” websites by default. Instead, it will support standards by default. Think about that. If you’re a developer, and you’ve somehow managed to remain completely unaware of standards-based design, your IE-only website won’t work in IE. Wow! Right? So what will you do?

If you plan to have a career, you’ll start learning about standards-based design fast. (IE8 will support old-fashioned IE-only sites if you insert a tag in the head of each web page instructing the browser to do so, but that’s merely to protect old sites; it’s not a strategy you can pursue if you intend to create new sites.)

That’s the big news where browsers and standards adoption are concerned.

He’s right. IE’s position as the dominant browser on the web combined with it’s everlasting lack of support for web standards has created a unique bottleneck that’s been hard, but not impossible, to ignore. The pressure for web standards that actually mean something has been building for years. That bottleneck is about to be opened wide and the aftermath will be painful on a grand scale.