SyntaxHighlighter. SimpleCode. Understanding Compatibility Modes in Internet Explorer 8 - We know IE! Hi everyone! With the release of IE 8, we felt that providing a little more detail around the different Compatibility Modes might be useful, so here goes! A fundamental problem discussed during each and every Internet Explorer release is balancing new features and functionality with site compatibility for the existing Web. On the one hand, new features and functionality push the Web forward. On the other hand, the Web is a large expanse; requiring every legacy page to support the "latest and greatest" browser version immediately at product launch just isn't feasible. Internet Explorer 8 addresses this challenge by introducing compatibility modes which gives a way to introduce new features and stricter compliance to standards while enabling it to be backward compliant.
In this post I would like to discuss how compatibility mode can be specified and how IE determines which mode to use in different scenarios. Rendering Modes X-UA-Compatible: IE=7 Table 1: Compatibility Mode Values Figure 1: Testing sites with Browser Mode vs. Doc Mode - IEBlog. IE8 Rendering Modes theory and practice « Sharovatov’s Weblog. Many web-developers moan about the Rendering Modes switch that’s been introduced in IE8. I’ve got some thoughts on this. Rendering modes switches history As you may know, IE5 on Mac (followed by IE6 on Windows) introduced Quirks and Standards compliancy modes with a DOCTYPE switcher. 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. DOCTYPE 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.
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. Quirks mode and DOCTYPE switch locked old web with old rendering engine, IE5 engine. P.S.