The issue persists with IE8 reverting to Quirks mode despite having the DOCTYPE specified

Whenever I try to load my site in IE8, it keeps reverting back to Quirks Mode and the page looks all distorted. I can manually switch it to IE8 document mode via developer tools and it works fine, but I'm puzzled as to why it keeps switching back to Quirks Mode on its own.

I have included <!DOCTYPE html> so it shouldn't be happening. The top of the page includes this code, generated by the CMS:

(ignore this line, it's here to show the blank lines in the source code)




<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<!--[if IE 7]>                  <html class="ie7 no-js" lang="en">     <![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 8]>              <html class="ie8 no-js" lang="en">     <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gte IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <html class="not-ie no-js" lang="en">  <!--<![endif]-->
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

Any suggestions or insights would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer №1

The w3c validator has identified an issue on your website where there is whitespace before your doctype, which can cause Internet Explorer to enter quirks mode.

Non-space characters were found before the doctype. A doctype should be the first thing in your HTML document.

For a potential solution to this problem, you can refer to this resource.

Answer №2

From my understanding, Internet Explorer defaults to Quirks mode unless you specifically instruct it to use standards. To ensure standards compliance in IE, I follow these steps...

<!DOCTYPE html> 

It is crucial that the doctype declaration is exactly as shown above in order to enforce the use of standards (so far, so good).

<html>
<head>

The following lines must be the very first within the head tag, or else they will be disregarded.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

The first line ensures standards compliance for IE versions that recognize "edge" - regardless of the version, anything above 9 should interpret this line as a directive to display in standards mode.

Due to IE9's lack of support for "edge", the second line enforces standards mode for IE9.

Since IE8 doesn't recognize the content value "IE=9", it bypasses it and moves on to the subsequent line, which it does understand and uses to display in standards mode.

I have tested all of these scenarios with extra spaces and line breaks above the doctype, and they functioned correctly even with additional formatting.

It might be possible to include another statement beneath the IE8 directive for IE7, but I can't guarantee this with absolute certainty.

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