Skip to main content

IE8 readiness

I know people have done in depth reviews etc..., but here is a quick a low down of what you need to do as a web developer to support IE8.

I am going to assume that you have been a standards based web developer for the last couple of years and that you have not been doing too many hacks to support IE7.

1) Add the new metatag in the top of the to force IE8 to render in standards mode.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

Without this tag a little button appears next to the location bar which allows the user to view the site in IE7 compatibility mode. You probably don't want to do this because you want people to view your nice standards compliant website and also the render mode is slightly different from real IE7 in any case.

2) If you were using conditional comments to catch IE and add some extra CSS, you will probably need to update the condition from

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie-hacks.css" />
<![endif]-->

to

<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie-hacks.css" />
<![endif]-->

3) You will probably want to put the above tags in a conditional which is controlled by a parameter so you can switch back and forth easily while testing

<% if params[:ie] != '7' %>

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie-hacks.css" />
<![endif]-->

<% end %>

And then access the IE7 mode in the following manner

http://yourserver.com/login?ie=7

4) There is currently a known bug with the scrollHeight and scrollTop properties (this broke the Yahoo Rich Text Editor I had embedded in my site http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2008/03/ie8_beta_1_firs.html). It does not appear to be fixed yet in the release version.

I am sure there is plenty more, but this is what I have discovered so far.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your stylesheet seems to cut long lines of <pre/> elements when there's not enough space. I use 1024x1280 screen and I don't see the endings of «meta» element example.

Also, blogger seems to have unfriendly kind of comment filter. I have to manually encode «<» sign... shame.
11:57 AM
Anonymous said…
Alternatively, you can refuse to support IE8's standards mode.

Good web designers should see that this approach goes against the whole principle of standards on the web which ultimately make our job easier and the users' experience better.

Support it and we'll all have to live with it. Ignore it and Microsoft might eventually release a working browser.
2:02 PM
skuunk said…
Hi liori,
Thanks for the tip. It looked fine in my browser, but I removed the pre tags.

Blogger's rich text editor is notoriously difficult for people typing in code samples I am afraid
3:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Master of my domain

Hi All, I just got myself a new domain ( http://www.skuunk.com ). The reason is that Blogspot.com is offering cheap domain via GoDaddy.com and I thought after having this nickname for nigh on 10 years it was time to buy the domain before someone else did (also I read somewhere that using blogspot.com in your domain is the equivalent of an aol.com or hotmail.com email address...shudder...). Of course I forgot that I would have to re-register my blog everywhere (which is taking ages) not to mention set up all my stats stuff again. *sigh*. It's a blogger's life... In any case, don't forget to bookmark the new address and to vote me up on Technorati !
Post a Comment
Read more

Responsive Web Design

I wanted to go over Responsive Web Design using CSS. In the old days of web development, we had to code to common screen sizes (i.e. 800 X 600, 1024 X 768) and we patiently waited for people to upgrade their computers to have a decent amount of screen real estate so we could design things the way we really wanted. We also took on semi stretchy web layouts etc to expand and contract appropriately. Then about 2 or 3 years ago, Apple released this little device called an iPhone with a 320 X 480 resolution which took the world by storm and suddenly a lot of people were viewing your website on a tiny screen again... Anyways, as it can be difficult to design a site which looks good on 320 X 480 AND 1680 X 1050, we need to come up with some kind of solution. One way is to sniff the client and then use an appropriate stylesheet, but then you are mixing CSS with either JavaScript or server side programming and also potentially maintaining a list of appropriate clients and stylesheets. Also, you...
13 comments
Read more

Freezing Gems

What is a gem and why would you want to freeze it? In Ruby, there are times when you want to access pieces of functionality that other people of written (3rd party libraries) and you normally have 2 options. You can install a plug in or install a gem. Normally the method you use is determined by which ever is made available by the author. Gems are installed on the host machine and are pretty handy when you want to run things in the command line or else across lots of projects, but their downside is that if you use a gem in a Rails project there is no automatic publishing mechanism when you deploy your site. You will need to log onto the remote host machine and install the gem manually. Plugins are specific to Rails and are similar to gems in that they are also 3rd party libraries. However they are associated with your Rails project as opposed to your machine so they will get posted to the server on a regular deploy. Freezing a gem is the process of transforming a gem into a plug in. Es...
22 comments
Read more