Is there a way to avoid IE7 quirks mode while rendering XML + CSS?

Question

I've got some DocBook documentation styled with a CSS xml-stylesheet declaration. It looks great in Firefox, but IE7 doesn't seem to understand the CSS child selectors (e.g. section > title { ... }).

I think this is because IE is running in quirks mode to render this XML, and older versions of IE didn't support that CSS syntax at all.

The pages I found on the web all seem to focus on HTML and XHTML doctypes and how IE will behave given various permutations of these values. I couldn't find any information about straight XML + CSS. Worse yet, it seems that random XML documents always end up in quirks mode, no matter what format or stylesheet directives they have.

Is XML rendering in IE doomed to be IE5.5 compatible? Will I really have to rewrite my CSS?

Answer 1

Can you please explain, what exactly works wrong? IE7 seem like supporting child selectors according to the docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250496%28VS.85%29.aspx