Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Issues With Websites Built With FrontPage

Microsoft has finally made Internet Explorer 8 as an automatic update. I am always thrilled with progress but I have a beef with Microsoft. I have several websites that do not view properly with IE8. The page looks distorted and the cells are longer (taller) and I can not shrink them in the normal way with Microsoft FrontPage.

I did some research and the answers I get are the problem is in the code and not in the browser. Well Microsoft should know that people that use FrontPage don't know enough about altering the HTML to correct the viewing problem. What pisses me off is is that Microsoft created Internet Explorer 8 and FrontPage - You would think they would allow web pages created with software WE BOUGHT FROM THEM to display properly in their new freaking browser.

I did find a workaround that is a snippet of code that fools IE8 into viewing the page as IE7. Blogger will not allow me to post this snippet, so you can copy and paste it from HERE.


Put it in your HTML code in the head section either right before or right after the the title. It seemed to allow pages to view normally. I did have a problem with http://websitefreebies.net/ where I placed the snippet after a style script in the head section. I moved the snippet up to right after the title and it seems to view properly. I have had reports of this not working at all for some webmasters, but experiment where you put it in the head section and it may save you some grief.


If that does not work, also you can try to remove any code above the {HTML} code in your text editor like {!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd} or similar text.


This is a headache we do not need and I hope Microsoft deals with this issue