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Site display issues in IE8 beta
Question
I have tested my site with the IE8 beta and found some problems with the site display. How can I fix this?
Answer
Firstly, IE8 is (at the time of writing) only available in beta form. It is a test version designed to demonstrate the new code, help Microsoft fix bugs, and help web developers prepare their sites for the new browser roll out.
There appear to be bugs in IE8 in terms of floated elements, such as the 'short format' product view. We also found some problems with general positioning of items so that two elements that should be side by side are not aligned properly. All the other standards-compliant browsers seem to render the pages without these bugs (i.e. Opera, Firefox and Safari). In fact, even IE6 and IE7 seem to handle these pages fine. So it could be that IE8 will have these issues fixed by the time of full release. Or maybe MS will insist that their browser is following the standards properly and ignore the fact that the other browsers all seem to take a different interpretation.
Fortunately, MS has considered the problems of incompatibility with the new browser and included a simple solution. A simple meta tag in your site can tell IE8 to render the page in IE7 'compatibility mode'. The tag needs to be placed in your skin template file, immediately after the 'head' tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
Once this is in place, all your pages should render on IE8 as if there were on IE7.
We view this as a temporary workaround. In theory, since CactuShop's XHTML skin is standards compliant, and all the other browsers render it perfectly, we assume that the final IE8 version will too. It won't really help any web developers if IE8 promises standards compliance and then simple interprets those standards differently to everyone else.