CODEWITHSUNDEEP
internet-explorer-8
Mark W
Mark W

Reputation: 5964

Why is IE8 saying page default is quirks mode?

Here is the doctype I am using:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4796

Answers (4)

dev101
dev101

Reputation: 1369

This page is high in Google rankings for 'why page triggers ie8 quirks mode', so I will post my 2 findings (through painfull troubleshooting experience):

1) Page will triger quirks mode if you use php in general, but say on that particular page you do not have any php code in the before <html> section at all, but for compatibility you wish to write empty <?php ?> tags at the opening. Now, say, you wish to 'minimize' that code and remove all the empty spaces in between, so you write:

<?php?>

This will trigger IE8 Quirks Mode, because before <!DOCTYPE html> now you will have an extra line with something like this in IE8:

<!-- -->

and in Chrome 34.x:

<!--?php?-->

common, but deadly mistake. Just put 

<?php ?>

(with space) to be safe.

2) Second reason was indeed very hard to discover. If you use UTF-8 for your documents and edit them with Notepad++, you will most probably set your character encoding as pure UTF-8 (Notepad++ > Encoding > Encode in UTF-8), and by chance you may trigger IE8 Quirks Mode!

Now, the solution is very simple: using Notepad++ just select Encoding > Convert using UTF-8 without BOM.

Quirks Mode is again gone!

Took me a while to catch all these, trying hard to find bugs in CSS, that were not CSS-related at all!

Upvotes: 1

Jacob Honeyhume
Jacob Honeyhume

Reputation: 1965

It sounds like you're dealing with an Intranet page, which IE8 and IE9 treat differently. If your page is considered to be in the Intranet Zone, IE8 will default to a compatibility mode that might be borking your page up a bit.

You may be able to get around this by using the X-UA-Compatible meta element, but I haven't tested this myself.

Upvotes: 1

MrWhite
MrWhite

Reputation: 45914

This will happen if you have content (an HTML comment perhaps) before the DOCTYPE. White-space should be OK in IE8 - although I think even this caused problems with IE6.

(In IE6 an XML declaration before the DOCTYPE would trigger quirks mode - this was fixed in IE7, but it would seem that other content before the DOCTYPE still triggers this.)

Upvotes: 8

BizNuge
BizNuge

Reputation: 938

not being funny, and I'm sure you've already checked this, but...

Have you tried pressing F12 to step into the IE Developer Console. Is there achance maybe that the "Document Mode" or "Browser Mode" is set to "Quirks Mode"

Forgive me if this isn't the case... I've simply fallen foul of this stupidity before...

Upvotes: 2

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