Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 has been released. The night before a big PR thing in Melbourne (Premier of Victoria, etc) and I decided to install it on my demo laptop. Brave, yet safe move.
What about this website?
Not so good. Something is broken somewhere. In the week before TechEd 2008 I don’t have time to completely diagnose and fix the wordpress template. So, sort of like welding it together for a few weeks until things die down – it is time for a simple fix.
How can you tell? See the “broken document†icon on the right of the URL: this indicates that the site has been designed for older browsers.
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There are two potential fixes. One is to click on the broken icon, and Internet Explorer will revert to Internet Explorer 7 mode.
A smarter fix for this web site is a one-line change to my template (in my case, header.php for this template)
<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=EmulateIE7” />
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Refreshing the site, and magically it renders correctly, and there is no “broken†document icon.
Without that metatag, it seems like if have an XHTML DTD set, IE8 will always give you that ‘broken icon’.
If you set your DTD to HTML 4.01, the site may render really weirdly, but it’ll no longer present the broken icon.
Le gah?
Err, scratch that. From the IE8 blog, it’ll display that everytime it’s in standards mode.
In quirks mode or when viewing locally/on an intranet, it AUTOMAGICALLY renders in IE7. Ouch.
If that is what it wants, it’s fairly useless, and stupid. Older websites don’t have this tag; they’re old, from before when Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 were around.
Internet Explorer 8 seems to be better than any previous version of IE. IE8 is very stable and rarely crashes or cause blue screens.
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