Why is http://www.shlomifish.org/ Displayed Wrong in MSIE 8?

Question

Hi all!

I maintain a personal web-site at http://www.shlomifish.org/ . It is displayed fine in Firefox 3.5, Opera 9.x, Konqueror 4.3 and Internet Explorer (MSIE) 7. However, with MSIE 8 ( 8.0.6001.18702 ) it is displayed completely wrong: there's a large whitespace at the top and I cannot see the left navigation menu.

The page validates as XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.

Can anyone shed some light on it, and let me know how I can fix it? I thought Internet Explorer 8 was supposed to be much more standards compliant than its predecessors.

Regards,

-- Shlomi Fish

Answer 1

As someone on web-design-l noted, I needed to use the Internet Explorer Developer Tools (which seems very nice and remind me of Firebug) and then I noticed that the Element tree of the page was completely off. As it turns out, some offending code in the AdBrite ad banner I placed there messed it up royally.

I have now removed it.

Answer 2

Use this meta tag to rollback IE8 to comaptibility mode (IE7 renedering). It will render everything on the site as IE7.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />