IE 8 beta2 website display issues

[Marco B]

Hi all,

Although Firefox 3 is my preferred browser, I recently decided to download the latest Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 edition.

Although my initial impression looking at for example the APUG site was good enough, since it displayed and seemed to function OK, I was subsequently less pleased when I hit my own webpage :rolleyes::

http://www.boeringa.demon.nl

Initially, I noticed all of the menu's were no longer working, but I also noticed all other links were dead, and other display issues as well.

Starting to read about IE 8, it seems it will better conform to webstandards... However, that may not be a good thing for everybody, as I unfortunately discovered.

Doing some more reading, I discovered that with IE 8, you can use "Browser targeting" and force IE 8 to render a page as IE 7. However, although I am making a bit of progress by making some changes to my code (I also detected a code issue in my pages that did not cause problems in previous versions of IE and current Firefox and Safari), I am still working on it and not have it right yet.

If anyone has some good tips on truly forcing IE 8 to behave like IE7 (except deinstalling the whole lot ), than they are welcome, I do not get the "Browser targeting" fully yet, nor does it seem to be a full solution to my website display issues.

BE WARNED!!!

Check your website before IE 8 hits the general public! Here's some info about the browser version targeting for IE:

http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

and

http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/2008/03/05/microsoft-reverse-versioning-descision-in-ie8/

 

[nickandre]

I recently decided to download the latest Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 edition

There's your problem right there!

 

[Marco B]

Yes, I know what's a "beta" ... Probably shouldn't have installed it and stay blisfully unaware of any possible future problem...

But hey, maybe the people embarking on the Titanic WOULD have liked to have some kind of forewarning in retrospect ... even if the chance of hitting an iceberg is not that big

But since other pages are rendering properly, it should at least be "possible" to have some proper rendering of these pages. At least got me on the track of some other issue needing fixing. But I still think others may be warned, either against using this beta or warned for true problems coming up in the "final" version

 

[Marco B]

Well, and in my former job, where I was working with software from a company that could be called "the Microsoft" of the "Geographical Information Systems" which, although not known to the general public, is a multi billion business with software packages selling for thousands of dollars PER SEAT(!), we always joked that the first "final" version of that company (ESRI) was the first beta being released...

Yes, despite even being used with the US defence, most scientific and western governmental organizations, and a company supplying 50% of the worldmarket and having a campus with some 800 programmers working on it, it was regularly that bad...

 

[Jim Noel]

Have you given Google's Chrome a try?

 

[jd callow]

You may wish to first fix your validation issues:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.boeringa.demon.nl/

Beyond that, don't 'fix' your site so thatit works in a beta browser. If it works in a standards complient browser such as FF or Safari, leave alone until MS gets their product to market.

 

[Marco B]

Thanks JD for pointing out that validator. That will be really helpful in the future. I never assumed my own website was OK in terms of full validated, but at least it did display OK and function in IE 7, Firefox and Safari.

Please note that I am just a novice with all this, and much of the code has been (semi) autogenerated using tools like an older version of Dreamweaver and JAlbum...

I don't have the money at the moment to have a good website designer to rebuild it all, nor did I 3 three years ago when I put it up. I also thought it a nice project to try and see if I could pull it off and put something together myself. Using Dreamweaver and JAlbum including a custom skin got me a long way... but that still leaves me quite a novice in the end.

I am just glad to have something online, but also glad that it is not just another 1 in thousands of standard "blogs". That was the main reason to try it myself.

Well, I'll put fixing all of the validation issues on my "To Do" list. But as you probably know yourself, time and money have a tendency to sometimes make "To Do" list "To Don't" lists... not that it is my intention to leave these issues.