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Information about your favorite browser: news, articles and more.
Internet Explorer 8’s multiple rendering modes
Published January 28th, 2008 in Browser Security, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8
Internet Explorer 8 is going to be the most standards-compliant IE yet, but it’s going about it in a way that has some people scratching their heads. With Internet Explorer 8, you have a choice in standards compliance modes. Sound oxymoronic? Shouldn’t there be one standards mode by default? Heck, shouldn’t the only mode be standards mode? Ah, idealism.
One of the nastier things about being a web developer, I’m told, is the existence of Internet Explorer. Massively popular, but full of "quirks," coding around IE can be a real pain. When IE7 shipped, many web developers recoiled in horror as sites that worked fine in IE6 broke. The problem, as is so often the case, is backwards compatibility. IE5.5 (and below) was decidedly nonstandard in its rendering behavior. Hundreds of millions of web pages were written to look "right" in IE5.5’s broken rendering. Wisdom and folly: IE8’s super standards mode cuts both ways: Page 1
