IE8 compatibility mode...help?

0
votes

I'm trying to setup compatibility mode in one of our web products however I cannot get compatiblity mode to work via a particular server.

To recount what I've done so far:

  1. I've set the the HTTP header X-UA-Compatible in IIS to IE=7

  2. I've set also addded the meta element as the first element in the head element to the master page:

Using fiddler I've checked the HTTP traffic and I can see the header value and the meta element. Using the same browser (different tab) when I point to our staging server the document renders as IE7 brower mode and IE7 document mode. Which is great. Unfortunately when I point to the live server which is configured in the same way as the staging server the document renders as IE8 browser mode and IE7 document mode.

As a result when I check the dev tools the CSS which is being applied to the html element is

" ie ie8 CSS1Compat Win32"

vs

" ie ie7 CSS1Compat Win32"

Has anyone got any suggestions what I might have missed?

Note there is a blank line before DOCTYPE instruction (which is meaningful). 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:b="http://www.backbase.com/2006/btl"
    xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" xmlns:e="http://www.backbase.com/2006/xel"
    xmlns:c="http://www.backbase.com/2006/command" xmlns:d="http://www.backbase.com/2006/tdl"
    xmlns:x="http://woodmac.com/x">
    <head><meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" /><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /><meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1" /><meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
        <script type="text/javascript" src="Backbase/engine/boot.js"></script>

    <link href="App_Themes/MANDA/print_style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /><link href="App_Themes/MANDA/screen_style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /></head>
    <body>

Thanks,

Philip

2
internet-explorer-8ie8-compatibility-mode

2 Answers

0
votes

Take a look at this site and see if you missed anything. It may be related to the doctype, but it looks like the meta tags should override that.

0
votes

What url are you using to access each server? IE8 has an option which is enabled by default which will force "intranet", or single-name, domains to render in compatibility mode regardless of your XUA and other header settings (Tools > Compatibility View Settings > Display intranet sites in compatibility view).

If this setting is enabled and you are accessing one or the other of your staging and prod sites with something like http://servername, then this may be causing them to render differently regardless of your setting.

Recently I was faced with this issue and ended up requiring all servers to be accessed with a domain extension (e.g. http://servername.company.com), and set the XUA header to IE7. Now everything renders in IE7 mode regardless of the server its running on.