IE 8: Standards Are Still Not Standard

So the people at Microsoft and the Web Standards group are all excited about a break-through new idea: Make web developers add an extra <meta> tag to get IE 8 to render according to W3 standards. Apparently, they don't realize that standards are supposed to be...how do you say...STANDARD! Apparently, writing good code is secondary to getting your page to look nice in Internet Explorer. And some people are defending this idea! I knew it was a questionable method as soon as I read the blog entry, and most people that posted there feel the same way. As for me, I want to know if I can use regular Ajax calls without having to work around ActiveX. Readers, please use Firefox or Opera or something that isn't Internet Explorer.