[Slightly OT] 'Quirks mode' wail of despair

[Simon Brooke]

There is no need to respond to this post. There is, in fact, no possible
helpful response to this post. I just needed to tear my hair in public...

I have a site I wrote for a customer four years ago. Recently, the customer
upgraded their browser (probably on an automatic upgrade) to Internet
Explorer 7, and phoned me up to say the site was broken. The site
is 'broken', because IE 7 loses a band about 1em high across the top of
the page; it spaces everything correctly, but this band is just white. So
I checked the site; it's all generated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, although
given the markup I'm using it could equally have been declared to be 1.0
Strict.

Standards-compliant browsers - Firefox, Konqi, Safari, Opera - render the
site just fine. Internet Explorer 6 rendered the site just fine. OK, I
thought, what's changed here? Is it %&$£$*$ 'quirks mode'? I deleted the
DTD declaration from a page, and, surprise, it rendered perfectly.

IE6, it appears, renders a page with an XML declaration and XHTML 1.0
Transitional doctype using 'quirks mode'. IE7 renders it using something
delightfully called 'Almost Standards Mode' (See
<URL:http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>). And my page design is obviously
triggering one of the 'almost' bits...

I do not want to return to the tag-soup era. I want to do things properly.
But my customers want their site to look the way they want it to look, and
that's reasonable because an increasing numbers of their customers will be
using IE7. So I have either to spend a long time sorting out how exactly
to write a standards-conformant page which looks the same on a
standards-compliant browser as the present page does, but which also looks
the same on IE7; or else I can just take the doctype out of the
templates...

It CANNOT be beyond the wit of the world's largest and richest software
company to build something that does this right, surely!
--
si***@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

[ This .sig subject to change without notice ]

[Joseph Kesselman]

Simon Brooke wrote:

It CANNOT be beyond the wit of the world's largest and richest software
company to build something that does this right, surely!

As far as I can tell, MS believes that IE does everything right and the
other ("standards-compliant") implementations are wrong.

--
Joe Kesselman / Beware the fury of a patient man. -- John Dryden

[Martin Honnen]

Simon Brooke wrote:

Standards-compliant browsers - Firefox, Konqi, Safari, Opera - render the
site just fine. Internet Explorer 6 rendered the site just fine. OK, I
thought, what's changed here? Is it %&$£$*$ 'quirks mode'? I deleted the
DTD declaration from a page, and, surprise, it rendered perfectly.

IE6, it appears, renders a page with an XML declaration and XHTML 1.0
Transitional doctype using 'quirks mode'. IE7 renders it using something
delightfully called 'Almost Standards Mode' (See
<URL:http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/>). And my page design is obviously
triggering one of the 'almost' bits...

I think the doctype sniffer in IE 7 is still rather easy to fool, try
both an XML declaration and a comment before the DOCTYPE and IE 7 might
render in quirks mode as you say IE 6 does for that site.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[Simon Brooke]

in message <46029dc0$1@kcnews01>, Joseph Kesselman
('k*************@comcast.net') wrote:

Simon Brooke wrote:

>It CANNOT be beyond the wit of the world's largest and richest software
company to build something that does this right, surely!

As far as I can tell, MS believes that IE does everything right and the
other ("standards-compliant") implementations are wrong.

You'd think so, but in fact they don't even claim that:

"As for IE’s CSS compliance, I’d love to have a honest, straightforward,
unbiased statement of exactly where we (and other browsers) are – despite
the fact that I know we would be behind today.[1]"

The IE7 teams priorities were, apparently, "...security, end user
experience, and standards improvements..." in that order [op cit]; also
here:

"...our top priority is (and will likely always be) security – not just
mechanical “fix buffer overruns� type stuff, but innovative stuff like the
anti-phishing work and low-rights IE. For IE7 in particular, our next
major priority is removing the biggest causes of difficulty for web
developers.[2]"

So no, they don't think their implementation is right, but they think it
isn't an important priority.

[1] <URL:http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/08/10/694584.aspx>
[2] <URL:http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx>

--
si***@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; Good grief, I can remember when England won the Ashes.

[Johannes Koch]

Simon Brooke schrieb:

The IE7 teams priorities were, apparently, "...security, end user
experience, and standards improvements..." in that order [op cit];

If web developers used only standards-compliant code without any hacks
for IE, the user experience with IE would often be pretty bad :-)

--
Johannes Koch
In te domine speravi; non confundar in aeternum.
(Te Deum, 4th cent.)