I just have a quick question about IE8 Standards mode vs Quirks mode.
The page displays fine if you load its first page then log in. I have searched for the doc type which i think is right for changing the page to IE8 Standards Mode and i think it works because IE's built in debugger says it's in that mode. Also if you start on another page which uses quirks mode then navigate to my site the debugger changes modes to IE8 standards.
The problem starts if your change the mode to IE8 standards before you visit the page. e.g say your on google and change the mode in the debugger to IE8 standards then visit the site the page isn't displayed correctly.
I hope i've explained my problem clearly enough. I've posted the doctype i'm using is that is any help.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Add this meta tag to the head
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
This will force IE into the latest standards mode. So if they have IE8 it will be in IE8 even if its set before to other mode.
Also you could start using the html doctype without problem
<!DOCTYPE html>
You can read more about it here:
The IE Blog has posted "How IE8 Determines Document Mode" which you should read. Also, note that MS introduced a (... ah! Geries beat me to the punch while typing this!) Take a look at Geries' comment. :)
Related
I have a page using the mixitup jquery script.
It works perfectly in Chrome, Opera and IE11.
But I need it to work in IE8 too.
I have the script working in IE8, just without the fancy animations, which is fine.
Except, it only works in IE8 when I set the browser compatibility view to 'Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View'.
In the screenshot below, it shows different version, but you can see what option I mean, the second one rather than the first one.
I have tried entering the following meta to the top of page:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge,chrome=1">
and also:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" >
But both those just seem to force the 'Internet Explorer 8', the equivalent to the top options in the screenshot... not the second one, which I need.
Can that be done?
thanks
If I understand your question correctly then may be below explanation will help you.
Using <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content=" _______ " />
The Standard User Agent modes (the non-emulate ones) ignore <!DOCTYPE> directives in your page and render based on the standards supported by that version of IE (e.g., IE=8 will better obey table border spacing and some pseudo selectors than IE=7).
Whereas, the Emulate modes tell IE to follow any <!DOCTYPE> directives in your page, rendering standards mode based the version you choose and quirks mode based on IE=5
Possible values for the content attribute are:
content="IE=5"
content="IE=7"
content="IE=EmulateIE7"
content="IE=8"
content="IE=EmulateIE8"
content="IE=9"
content="IE=EmulateIE9"
content="IE=edge"
If meta tag solution wasn't working for you then set it
header('X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge,chrome=1');
Here is the doctype I am using:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
This will happen if you have content (an HTML comment perhaps) before the DOCTYPE. White-space should be OK in IE8 - although I think even this caused problems with IE6.
(In IE6 an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE would trigger quirks mode - this was fixed in IE7, but it would seem that other content before the DOCTYPE still triggers this.)
not being funny, and I'm sure you've already checked this, but...
Have you tried pressing F12 to step into the IE Developer Console. Is there achance maybe that the "Document Mode" or "Browser Mode" is set to "Quirks Mode"
Forgive me if this isn't the case... I've simply fallen foul of this stupidity before...
It sounds like you're dealing with an Intranet page, which IE8 and IE9 treat differently. If your page is considered to be in the Intranet Zone, IE8 will default to a compatibility mode that might be borking your page up a bit.
You may be able to get around this by using the X-UA-Compatible meta element, but I haven't tested this myself.
This page is high in Google rankings for 'why page triggers ie8 quirks mode', so I will post my 2 findings (through painfull troubleshooting experience):
1) Page will triger quirks mode if you use php in general, but say on that particular page you do not have any php code in the before <html> section at all, but for compatibility you wish to write empty <?php ?> tags at the opening. Now, say, you wish to 'minimize' that code and remove all the empty spaces in between, so you write:
<?php?>
This will trigger IE8 Quirks Mode, because before <!DOCTYPE html> now you will have an extra line with something like this in IE8:
<!-- -->
and in Chrome 34.x:
<!--?php?-->
common, but deadly mistake. Just put
<?php ?>
(with space) to be safe.
2) Second reason was indeed very hard to discover. If you use UTF-8 for your documents and edit them with Notepad++, you will most probably set your character encoding as pure UTF-8 (Notepad++ > Encoding > Encode in UTF-8), and by chance you may trigger IE8 Quirks Mode!
Now, the solution is very simple: using Notepad++ just select Encoding > Convert using UTF-8 without BOM.
Quirks Mode is again gone!
Took me a while to catch all these, trying hard to find bugs in CSS, that were not CSS-related at all!
We're in the process of converting web app to IE8 (now client is using IE6). We didn't create that app. We are only modifying and adding features to it. When I visit most of the pages in this app using IE8 developer tools show that IE is working in Quirks mode. But some of the pages work in Internet Explorer 8 Standards Mode. This page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565628(VS.85).aspx says:
"Quirks Mode: This behavior matches that of Internet Explorer when rendering a document with no doctype or a Quirks doctype."
But all of our pages have DOCTYPE defined - !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" (I don't know how to enter angle brackets here but they are present on webpage.
Can anyone explain me why is IE8 working in both Quirks and standard mode when displaying pages that all have DOCTYPE defined? Or maybe show me two examples of pages that IE8 displays in Quirks and standard mode?
The doctype tag has to be first in the markup, otherwise it's ignored. If you have an XML declaration tag before the doctype tag, IE will ignore the doctype.
If the HTML markup is utterly broken, the browser might fall back into interpreting it as tag soup instead of as an HTML document, and rendering it in Quirks mode.
Use the W3C HTML validator to check that the code doesn't have any serious errors.
Try viewing your HTML i an HEX editor. There might be some weird characters (usually 3: ef bb bf) just before the DOCTYPE declaration. IE also falls into quirks in that case. Happened to me before, and happening right now as well.
I have a problem I haven't seen before. I am doing a realign on our company's website and am testing locally. However, when I upload to our test server I notice display discrepancies within the same browser (IE8)!
Here is a screenshot of the two pages, both viewed in IE8 but residing on different servers. In the page on the right, you can see there is a weird chunk of white space to the side underneath the .swf file.
Can anyone give any insight as to why the same page on distinct servers would look different in the same browser? I have also noticed a couple of other cross-server bugs within Firefox.
Thanks!
One possibility that comes to mind is IE8's compatibility mode. There is the X-UA-Compatible header directive that forces IE8 into compatibility mode or out of it. Maybe one of the servers sends out that information.
Try adding a compatibility mode directive to the header and see whether it has any effect:
<!-- Mimic Internet Explorer 7 -->
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" >
and alternatively:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=100" > <!-- IE8 mode -->
Reference at MSDN: Defining Document Compatibility
I'm working on a page that, when I load into IE8 and view the developers tools it tells me that page default is quirks mode.
I've got a strict DTD:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
I even went ahead and put in the explicit standards switch, though I didn't think I'd need to:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
I can't understand why page default isn't IE8 standards?
Only thing I can think of is that to get to this page, I first have to log in to an application and the first pages I must traverse are old quirks mode pages. Does IE decide on which mode to use at a server level, or is it supposed to decide page by page?
Thanks!
Does IE decide on which mode to use at a server level
Not generally, no. There is the ugliness of the compatibility view list, which is site-specific, but that only kicks you back to IE7-style-Standards Mode, not IE5.5-style-Quirks-Mode.
Your code otherwise looks OK, as long as that DOCTYPE is the very first thing on the page. IE will be forced to document.compatMode= 'BackCompat' if there is a comment, PI, XML declaration (prior to IE8) or any non-whitespace textual content before the doctype. If a control character has snuck in that you can't see in your text editor, that could do it.
Example problem page?