OSNews

IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

What does it mean "in IE8 standards mode?"

One person brought up an interesting point on the blog (near the bottom as of this writing) - if IE8 has two modes, then it's useless.

I assume [hope] it's a default mode for all sites to render correctly. Then for any site which relies on old broken IE behavior, THOSE specific sites are rendered in "compatibility" mode.

Ever since version 6, IE has had a "standards-compliant" mode and a "compatibiltiy" mode equivalent to Firefox quirks mode. The quirks mode is basically laid out like IE4, and the standards-compliant mode is supposedly laid out according to web standards, though the actual compliance with those standards has been improving gradually. IE7's standards-compliant mode is actually pretty good - though not all the way there yet, IE7 can render most pages pretty close to the way they would render in Firefox and such.

You have to trigger standards compliant mode by including a proper doctype declaration. There are pages on MSDN that list the doctypes that will trigger it, a pretty long list that includes all modern HTML 4 or XHTML 1 standards.

MSDN changes their linking structure pretty often, but this page seems to work right now: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms535242(VS.85).aspx

Edit: Got the initial version wrong (is IE6, not 5).

Edited 2007-12-19 22:57

Both IE AND Firefox have a quirks mode and a standards mode. If you use the correct DOCTYPE and have valid code, they are supposed to render the page according to W3C standards, otherwise they revert to a compatibility mode for older, non valid HTML. There's lots of good reasons for this.

Every browser engine I know has at least two modes:
Standards compliance mode.
Quirks mode.

If a HTML file has a correct header, the browser usually tries to render the HTML file according the specifications in the header (like HTML 4.0 strict etc.). If the renderer detects lots of errors, it falls back into quirks mode. The quirks mode is the really hard part to program in a renderer. It tries to interpret common mistakes by web page authors the way they might have intended it and not how a standard decribes it. The quirks mode is the mode older KHTML versions and iCab lack. That's also the mode Apple vastly improved in WebKit compared to older KHTML releases.

At least Firefox shows you which mode it's using: Use Tools -> Page Info ("General" tab).

I thought that would be similar to Firefox's "Quirks Mode". I could be wrong on this, but I thought Firefox had a Standards and Quirks Mode.

Quirks Mode would be applied on sites that do not apply the proper doc type. At least that was my understanding.

With HTML there are a couple of doctypes at the top of the page. There is strict which is usually considered standard mode. Then their is traditional or loose which allows backwards compatibility. This is all dependent on the web developer not personal settings of the browser

Firefox and Opera must be useless then. If you are browsing OSNews in Forefox right click on an empty part of the page, select 'View Page Info'. Look for render mode. You will see it says 'Quirks Mode'. I believe all browsers do this. I like developing in XHTML 1.0 Strict as browsers seem to have the least differences that way. All browsers need to have different modes. If the detect missing, bad or old documents types then they default to the 'quirks' mode. If it is well formed and modern they use the standards compliance mode.