IE8 Big Problem! Not displaying site properly.

Question

Hi, i am an amateur website developer and am not that informed on the differences in site rendering by the various browsers. I use firefox to develop and I guess I shouldn't be.

http://womenssoccerclub.com/pages/twocolumn_2.php?t=April%20-%20May%202009%20homepage

This site (in IE8) is not displaying anything to what it looks like in firefox. Also...in the source for IE8 there is all this code:

<!--[if gte mso 9]>.... I didn't write that in there. It FILLS the source with (to me is) garbldy goop. Is this an IE8 thing?

Please Help!
Ian McCullough

Answer 1

have you pasted some content from word - if you have that will bring along all the funny formatting that you are seeing.

solution is to paste your text into notepad first which will clear the formatting.

Josh

Answer 2

I think you should definitely check your page in the online validator. Right now it finds 141 errors.

Answer 3

Then after you have checked the stuff Josh and Malcolm above has told you to check and fix, make sure it works with FireFox and Chrome. And don't give a damn about IE. They'll (MSFT) come around as more and more people are doing this - as in MSFT will soon be forced to be 100% validating when the web looks "one way" through the Spyglass (IE) and another way through any standard compliant browser...

Pretty controversial, yes I know - but to get "100% equality" in IE is basically trying to get a steam train from a steam train vendor to run on a mono rail. The vendor of the steam train technology earns no money on that mono rail technology and they will always make sure their trains - which happens to have the larger market share - does everything just so slightly different that the mono rail technology seems like a "bad idea"...

Erik Naggum once said; "Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer"

Generally I don't 100% agree with that statement, all though when it comes to "the web" I have completely given up on IE. You should too, it's quite soothing in fact :)

Answer 4

You could see if forcing IE8 to render as IE7 fixes it as a short term.

Add the html meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"/>