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Frustrating: Can't force IE 8 into "Compatibility view"!

Answer 1

A:

Isn't the problem that you're using the wrong document type?

Maybe:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"&gt;

For more info, see http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html.

Software Monkey 2009-08-03 21:35:53

There's nothing really wrong with the doctype. There are plenty of reasons not to use XHTML, but that's an entirely different matter.

Michael Madsen 2009-08-03 21:54:57

And even if there was something wrong. Pressing the "Compatibility view" button in my case ignores this and shows the site perfectly. EmulateIE7 should really just to the same. That would be obvious.

MonkeyZinc 2009-08-05 18:41:17

Answer 2

+5 A:

To quote the IEBlog:

“Browser Mode” affects the user agent string, version vector used when evaluating conditional comments, and the rendering mode.

It's detailed a bit more on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565624(VS.85).aspx.

As you can clearly see, you wouldn't be able to affect all of these things anyway: by the time you tell the browser to act like IE7, it's already acting as IE8.

Perhaps the real question is: Why does it matter that much to you what the browser mode is? The document mode is what you should be most concerned with - everything the browser mode changes as far as the rendering is concerned relate to stuff that is excluded/included but version checking, and users aren't going to look in the developer tools anyway, so they won't care.

Instead of wasting a lot of time getting it to look like pure compatibility mode in the developer tools, you should rather go and make sure that user agent string checking and conditional comments make it so that IE7 and IE8 get the same material to work with, and then leave the EmulateIE7 in.

EDIT:

The problem is your version checks, and as I promised below, I'm going to tell you where the problem is.

If you use the developer tools to debug the menu placement script, you can dig down and see that the execution path for get_x_position differs when the browser reports itself as IE7 or IE8: is_ie5up is set to true for IE7 mode, and false for IE8 mode. This results in very different values being returned.

At this point, we must go back to where this variable is set:

var is_ie5up    = (is_ie6up || (is_ie  && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4));

As you can see, this depends on the value of is_ie6up, so let's have a look at the surrounding code...

var is_ie8up    = (is_ie8   ||  is_ie9up);
var is_ie7up    = (is_ie7   ||  is_ie8up);
var is_ie7up    = (is_ie7);
var is_ie6up    = (is_ie6   || is_ie7);
var is_ie5up    = (is_ie6up || (is_ie  && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4));
var is_ie5_5up  = (is_ie6up || (is_ie && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4 && !is_ie5));

...do you spot the flaw (Hint: compare lines 2 and 4 of that snippet)?

That's right: is_ie6up is not set to true unless the browser is exactly IE6 or IE7. The proper line should of course read

var is_ie6up    = (is_ie6   || is_ie7up);

...but wait. That's no good either, because line 3 of the snippet changes is_ie7up to only be true if the browser is exactly IE7! So, you need to delete the overwriting of is_ie7up, and fix the setting of is_ie6up.

My guess is that you have the EXACT same problem on the other site: you've messed up the browser checks in much the same way.

Michael Madsen 2009-08-03 21:51:49

"Why does it matter that much to you what the browser mode is?"It matters because i need to force/trigger the third browser mode "Internet Explore 8 Compatibility View" because ONLY in this mode my site looks right. EmulateIE7 triggers the "Internet explore 8" browser mode and the "IE7 Standards" document mode but in my case this is visually not the same as "Internet Explore 8 Compatibility View" and it looks wrong.

MonkeyZinc 2009-08-05 18:37:04

The URL of one of the sites is:http://www.topotarget.comand athttp://www.topotarget.com/index_test.dspyou can see the frontpage of the site with EmulateIE7 turned on. Hope this helps you to understand my problem.

MonkeyZinc 2009-08-05 18:37:35

About the Developer tools: I only use it for debugging to prove my point in this question. So i understand what you say about that.

MonkeyZinc 2009-08-05 18:38:13

The problem is, as mentioned earlier, in your version checks. I'll edit my post to show exactly where it all goes wrong.

Michael Madsen 2009-08-05 20:44:12

Answer 3

+2 A:

You have set the meta tag correctly, but IE8 appears to use the previous rendering mode until you restart the browser.

To tell what your users are going to see:

Click on the Document Mode in the developer toolbar and see which value is marked (Page Default).
Restart IE8 and view your document - IE should now use the page default.

wrumsby 2009-08-10 02:47:55

Answer 4

+1 A:

The xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" attribute is cancelling out the meta tag. Move the meta tag above the html tag. Yep, that's right, above the html tag. Then it will execute the emulateIE7 before the javascript runs. I tested this in IE7, IE8 and Firefox.

Tone 2009-10-09 04:11:23

Yes! I had the "emulateIE7" inside an "If IE" statement that once removed and above the HTML it worked. This tip finally worked for me, thanks.

rtfminc 2010-07-23 06:45:13

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Frustrating: Can't force IE 8 into "Compatibility view"!

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