I was geting some negative feed back at work about an application I built a year or so ago. All of a sudden it seemed to stop working for some people. Here's what I learned.
If you define a doctype for a page, as you should, but then find that the page doesn’t quite work right* in IE8 (which is currently in beta) chances are there is something slightly invalid about your HTML.
Microsoft has apparently done a 180 on their standards handling and now treats everything (even transitional doctypes, it would seem) very strictly. IE8 includes a button that users can clicked called “compatibility mode” which emulates IE7 (thus ignoring errors) and allows the page to work as expected.
While best practice dictates fixing the page – the easiest work around is to include this meta tag on effected pages:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />This forces the page into IE7 mode so the user doesn’t have to click the buttom themselves (which they probably wouldn't think to do on their own)
See also
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952030* symptoms include:
• Misaligned Web page layout
• Overlapping text or images
• JavaScript functionality issues and errors
My major problem was JS not working right
