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Wednesday, March 25. 2009IE8 X-UA-Compatible Rant
A few days ago, Microsoft had done a low-key launch of IE8, which means you need to make your applications compatible with 3 differently broken version of IE ;-P. The biggest challenge IE8 poses is that it runs in "strict" mode by default, which coincidentally breaks all of the previous IE6/7 hacks that had to put in place to make CSS and Javascript render in IE the same way they do in other browsers.
Fortunately, unless you wish to refractor your entire code to support IE8 strictness, MS did add a "compatibility" switch, via the X-UA-Compatible meta-tag or header, if you change its value to "IE=EmulateIE7" it makes it emulate the "strict" mode ala IE7, which at least in all of our code makes it render things properly. However, there is a "slight" problem, which I discovered while trying to implement this function. According to the docs, you can trigger this behavior via the following meta tag: CODE: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> , unfortunately it didn't work and according to the IE8's developer tool the default strict mode of IE8 was still being used. No matter the value, be it IE=IE7 or IE5 or EmulateIE7, it would just be ignored. Eventually, I realized that perhaps the DTD is the problem, our pages use XHTML/Transitional DTD, (CODE: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ), which means custom meta tags are effectively spec violations. Which, as far as I can tell IE8 in it's strict mode happily ignores, Catch 22!. This is despite a nice note inside MSDN Blog that says:"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> CODE: NOTE: The X-UA-Compatible tag and header override any existing DOCTYPE. The solution, is to set the X-UA-Compatible value via an HTTP header ala: PHP: This means the parameter is outside of HTML and will get properly captured by IE, in our case that solved all of the JS and CSS issues that appeared in IE8. For those of you using ExtJS date picker, this does solve the cut-off of the calendar window. Comments
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Evert on :
I had a similar problem, but my mistake was that the meta-tag needs to come before any other tags in the head-section (including link).
The DTD you use was probably ignored already anyway Henri Sivonen on :
MSDN documentation on this topic is inaccurate. I have a researched flowchart:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ie8-mode.pdf Marin on :
Hi, just a few remarks about this article:
You often mention "strict" mode, I guess you are meaning "standard" (rendering) mode. You also mention the http-equiv value as "IE=IE7 or IE5". According to the docs, these values are not accurate: see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533876(VS.85).aspx Those should be IE=7 or IE=5 Can you provide examples of what you tested to come to this article? Thx ilia on :
I tried various combination of the meta X-UA-Compatible parameter with different values.
As well as different positioning of the header, first, last, in the middle. efusien on :
The code above is an alternate solution :
Efusien on :
The code :
header("Location: http://www.getfirefox.net"); Alex Indigo on :
You shouldn't use hacks on first place.
They have conditional comments for long time already, so all "refactor" would be to change < !--[if IE]>< link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie.css" />< ![endif]--> to < !--[if lte IE 7]>< link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie.css" />< ![endif]--> Looks like somebody is never happy with Microsoft no matter what they do  PS. Your anti-spam box doesn't work if you visit www.ilia.ws. Armando on :
Just put the meta tag like the first child of the header node
Pozycjonowanie on :
Good thing even microsoft discourages using IE now. Maybe over time less and less peolpe will be using it an admins won't have that many problems with optimisation.
John Davenport Scheuer on :
As noted, the placement of the meta tag as first in the head section is important. However, the server may override this. In a case like that, as with server overrides of character encoding meta tags, the method shown for PHP is a workable solution.
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