S
Simon Brooke
There is no need to respond to this post. There is, in fact, no possible
helpful response to this post. I just needed to tear my hair in public...
I have a site I wrote for a customer four years ago. Recently, the customer
upgraded their browser (probably on an automatic upgrade) to Internet
Explorer 7, and phoned me up to say the site was broken. The site
is 'broken', because IE 7 loses a band about 1em high across the top of
the page; it spaces everything correctly, but this band is just white. So
I checked the site; it's all generated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, although
given the markup I'm using it could equally have been declared to be 1.0
Strict.
Standards-compliant browsers - Firefox, Konqi, Safari, Opera - render the
site just fine. Internet Explorer 6 rendered the site just fine. OK, I
thought, what's changed here? Is it %&$£$*$ 'quirks mode'? I deleted the
DTD declaration from a page, and, surprise, it rendered perfectly.
IE6, it appears, renders a page with an XML declaration and XHTML 1.0
Transitional doctype using 'quirks mode'. IE7 renders it using something
delightfully called 'Almost Standards Mode' (See
<URL:http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>). And my page design is obviously
triggering one of the 'almost' bits...
I do not want to return to the tag-soup era. I want to do things properly.
But my customers want their site to look the way they want it to look, and
that's reasonable because an increasing numbers of their customers will be
using IE7. So I have either to spend a long time sorting out how exactly
to write a standards-conformant page which looks the same on a
standards-compliant browser as the present page does, but which also looks
the same on IE7; or else I can just take the doctype out of the
templates...
It CANNOT be beyond the wit of the world's largest and richest software
company to build something that does this right, surely!
helpful response to this post. I just needed to tear my hair in public...
I have a site I wrote for a customer four years ago. Recently, the customer
upgraded their browser (probably on an automatic upgrade) to Internet
Explorer 7, and phoned me up to say the site was broken. The site
is 'broken', because IE 7 loses a band about 1em high across the top of
the page; it spaces everything correctly, but this band is just white. So
I checked the site; it's all generated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, although
given the markup I'm using it could equally have been declared to be 1.0
Strict.
Standards-compliant browsers - Firefox, Konqi, Safari, Opera - render the
site just fine. Internet Explorer 6 rendered the site just fine. OK, I
thought, what's changed here? Is it %&$£$*$ 'quirks mode'? I deleted the
DTD declaration from a page, and, surprise, it rendered perfectly.
IE6, it appears, renders a page with an XML declaration and XHTML 1.0
Transitional doctype using 'quirks mode'. IE7 renders it using something
delightfully called 'Almost Standards Mode' (See
<URL:http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>). And my page design is obviously
triggering one of the 'almost' bits...
I do not want to return to the tag-soup era. I want to do things properly.
But my customers want their site to look the way they want it to look, and
that's reasonable because an increasing numbers of their customers will be
using IE7. So I have either to spend a long time sorting out how exactly
to write a standards-conformant page which looks the same on a
standards-compliant browser as the present page does, but which also looks
the same on IE7; or else I can just take the doctype out of the
templates...
It CANNOT be beyond the wit of the world's largest and richest software
company to build something that does this right, surely!
