IE 8 and standards support confusion

Microsoft says its going to require web developers to “opt-in” to standards mode in IE 8 in order to render their pages strictly according to standards specifications.

HUH?

What about doctype switching?… which IE already supports. This doesn’t make any sense.

I’m not a big fan of doctype switching, but adding yet another flag for specifying the desired rendering mode just makes the situation even worse.

Here’s hoping this information is incorrect.

Update: more entirely confounding quotes from the IE team:

“Five years ago, no one in the top 200 Web sites was using standards,” Wilson said. “Today it is half of the top 200 Web pages.”

Does not compute… Does not compute…

I’m quite certain that at least 199 of those 200 sites were developed with HTML. Since when is HTML not a web standard? What could be considered more of a web standard than HTML? HTTP? Pretty sure they used that too. I just don’t understand the comments coming from the IE team at all. Is there some reason they are purposely spreading confusion?