Version 2.0 - Standard Edition or Professional Edition

What are the differences between 2.0 standard edition and 2.0 professional edition? What are the unique features of each of these releases? Are the differences solely based on the browsers supported? Are the code bases, and any other supporting content, the same? In other words, how do these two releases really differ? I can't seem to find any substantial information regarding this anywhere on this site.

Maybe because it's not been released yet.

Alex, could you please comment on this...

Mario,

the only differences between standard and professional editions are browser and doctype support.

Standard edition: IE, Mozilla/Firefox, quirks mode (no doctype)
Professional edition: IE, Moz/FF, Safari, Opera, quirks and standards-compliant modes (any doctype)

All other features (classes, functions, styles etc..) are exactly the same.

In my view you would only need professional edition if you have to support Safari and/or Opera.

Isn't saying "you would need professional edition if you have to support Safari and/or Opera" a bit misleading.....

... surely the doctype support issue is important as well for any work that is being done in standards compliant mode (i.e. with doctype switching)? Isn't most new work going the standards compliant way?

Will

In my view as long as the majority of your users are on Internet Explorer - developing any rich DHTML application in standards compliant mode is very bad idea (unless you are CSS guru and enjoy doing things the 'hard' way). IE6 simply does not support strict mode well enough (IE5.5 does not support strict mode at all) so you will spend a lot of time fixing IE problems rather than doing 'real' work.

On the other hand if you have to provide Safari support - you have no choice as Safari only works in standards compliant mode. So this is probably the only case IMHO where standards compliant mode is useful (just don't forget that it forces you to drop IE5.5 which still has more users than Safari and Opera together).

There is another point that is if a application is sold then a user will use what ever you tell them to. They might complain but they will still do as you ask since it is a requirment for your application.