Home/ Questions/Q 424457
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T19:16:55+00:00

I’m working on a page that, when I load into IE8 and view the

  • 0

I’m working on a page that, when I load into IE8 and view the developers tools it tells me that page default is quirks mode.

I’ve got a strict DTD:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

I even went ahead and put in the explicit standards switch, though I didn’t think I’d need to:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

I can’t understand why page default isn’t IE8 standards?

Only thing I can think of is that to get to this page, I first have to log in to an application and the first pages I must traverse are old quirks mode pages. Does IE decide on which mode to use at a server level, or is it supposed to decide page by page?

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Does IE decide on which mode to use at a server level

    Not generally, no. There is the ugliness of the compatibility view list, which is site-specific, but that only kicks you back to IE7-style-Standards Mode, not IE5.5-style-Quirks-Mode.

    Your code otherwise looks OK, as long as that DOCTYPE is the very first thing on the page. IE will be forced to document.compatMode= 'BackCompat' if there is a comment, PI, XML declaration (prior to IE8) or any non-whitespace textual content before the doctype. If a control character has snuck in that you can’t see in your text editor, that could do it.

    Example problem page?

    • 0