Forcing IE7 into standards rendering mode (not quirks)

Question

Forcing IE7 into standards rendering mode (not quirks)

12.1k views Asked by Matthew Farver At 09 February 2011 at 14:32

I'm having display issues in IE7 due to it rendering in quirks mode. I've confirmed this by displaying "document.compatMode" and getting back "BackCompat" as opposed to "CSS1Compat". Using IE8 and reverting to IE7 works, because that keeps it out of quirks. In plain IE8 I have it fixed by forcing the rendering mode with the X-UA-Compatible header, but this does not work for IE7. The other browsers also display in quirks, but unlike IE this does not put them into pseudo-IE5.5 mode, so they still render fine.

How can I force IE7 to render in standards rendering mode and not quirks? I've tried setting the DOCTYPE to a number of different options and I'm not adding the xml prologue. Thanks in advance for any replies.

Original Q&A

There are 2 answers

**Alain Pannetier** · Answer 1 · 2011-02-09 14:44:46

Did you try to the XHTML 4 strict DTD ?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Also beware that if there is anything before that DTD declaration, IE7 will still stay in quirk mode.

In other words:

IE7: strict

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

or

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

IE7: quirk

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- stuff -->
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Where it gets nasty is that : IE6 takes the following as Quirk mode.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

**Spudley** · Answer 2 · 2011-02-09 16:19:47

Spudley On 09 February 2011 at 16:19

Have you run your code through the W3C validator?

If you have invalid HTML, IE may revert to quirks mode regardless of the doctype.

TechQA.

Forcing IE7 into standards rendering mode (not quirks)

There are 2 answers

Related Questions in INTERNET-EXPLORER-7

Related Questions in RENDERING

Related Questions in QUIRKS-MODE

Related Questions in WEBPAGE-RENDERING

Popular Questions

Popular Tags

Trending Questions