Today I was assigned a bug saying that some page elements don’t work on IE8 Quirks mode at all, and I need to fix them. The point is that I believe our pages will always be rendered in Standard mode, because we specify DOCTYPE at the beginning of every page (via master page). I’d think it must be some debugging tools changed that during testing.
I managed to convice QA to close it as by design, after a brief explanation to her. Now I start to think the question that whether we should have our page work on both Standard and Quirks mode. Maybe we should try to minimize the problem even if the page is not rendering in a supposed mode?
Any standard or best practices on that? Thanks!
You should always use standards mode, as that will provide the most consistent experience across browsers and (especially) across browser versions. It’s reasonable to expect that someday in the distant future, quirks mode will cease to be necessary, and standards mode will be all there is. It’s already difficult enough making pages work in different browsers, and if you had to do it in different modes in different browsers (IE isn’t the only browser with quirks mode), your work will get a whole lot harder.