Div tags rendering as tables in IE

Question

I have an ASP.NET 1.1 application being used by many clients. Some of these clients have recently started to see problems with the HTML rendering in IE only. All div tags are now rendering as tables.

We also have one development machine running IE 7 that is showing the same problem in one scenario: when the application is installed on the machine and using the same machine we browse to the application.

This development machine can look at remote installations of the application and other clients, using IE 7, can look at the development machines installation without any problems.

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All Div tags have been replaced with table tags.

This is a sample of the HTML rendered correctly in IE:

<div id="wtbToolbar"></div>

And this is how the same HTML renders in IE on the machine with the problem:

<table id="wtbToolbar"><tr><td></td></tr></table>

The source of this HTML is an ASP.NET control, which inherits from WebControl. The WebControl.TagKey and WebControl.TagName properties are already override to return Div.

The web.config file already contains a browserCaps section to correct a similar problem in Firefox.

Maybe I need to update the browserCaps to include IE?

Thanks

Answer 1

ASP NET 1.1 (especially) could render different HTML depending on how it detected the browser "capabilities". It refered to browsers as being "UpLevel" or "DownLevel" and often rendered different output depending on this.

ASP .NET based this detection on something called the browserCaps file. You can read more about this at Coding Horror. It may just be possible that changing something in the browserCaps file can sort this out. Another good article on this is A Look at ASP.NET's Adaptive Rendering. Good luck!