IE8 IS COMPATIBILITY VIEW ON BY DEFAULT HOW TOFirst of all, by the time when first IE7 beta was shipped, other browsers had really insignificant market share (so their developers could change anything and wouldn’t be blamed for “breaking the web”), were updated really often and were mostly installed by IT-related people who knew how to update the browser. Other browsers didn’t have a similar problem, and there’re many reasons to this. Basically, all the websites with DOCTYPES that were just fixed for IE7 Standards Compliancy mode would break in IE8 again. And while IE7 was a minor update to IE6 but still caused so much trouble, one could imagine what IE8 with proper CSS2.1 support would do to websites. In IE7 old web-sites in quirks mode continued being rendered by IE5 rendering engine, and standards compliancy engine was just an updated version of IE6 standards compliancy rendering engine with some bugs fixed. However, with XP SP3 update IE6 started showing equal to that of IE7 and conditional compilation became pretty useless. Conditional comments and conditional compilation came to rescue. That’s why many of these websites had rendering issues and had to fix CSS/JS for IE7 specifically. So when IE7 was shipped, it had better support for CSS2.1 but had the same DOCTYPE rendering modes switch. When developers started using DOCTYPE switch, IE6 was a major browser and all the sites were build around its CSS support level. Therefore DOCTYPE switch only solves backwards compatibility issue and does nothing to prevent future compatibility issues. It’s important to note that DOCTYPE can only toggle standards compliancy on and off. I’m not wrong – after IE4 won first browsers war ( BW I) nearly all sites were built for IE4 and IE5 only, so all other browsers had nothing to do but copy IE5 behaviour. Quirks mode and DOCTYPE switch locked old web with old rendering engine, IE5 engine. And if developers wanted to use modern standards, they added HTML or XHTML DOCTYPE and the page was rendered using standard-compliant parser. This switch was required because many sites were built at the time when even CSS1 was a draft, and for browsers to evolve safely (and add newer standards’ support) without breaking the existing web these old websites were to be rendered properly.Īt the time the idea of using DOCTYPE as a rendering mode switcher was fine – almost all pages that had been built without standards support in mind didn’t have DOCTYPE. All other browsers followed the move and introduced similar approach – they tried to mimic IE behaviour in quirks mode and tried supporting CSS as close to the W3C standard as they could.ĭOCTYPE switch approach was really straight forward – if you put a valid DOCTYPE for your HTML page, browser switches to the standards compliancy mode if DOCTYPE is omitted, quirks mode is used. IE8 IS COMPATIBILITY VIEW ON BY DEFAULT MACRendering modes switches historyĪs you may know, IE5 on Mac (followed by IE6 on Windows) introduced Quirks and Standards compliancy modes with a DOCTYPE switcher. Many web-developers moan about the Rendering Modes switch that’s been introduced in IE8.
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