Pete LePage and IE 8 Compatibility Interview @TechEd Barcelona

Matt Hester — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:10:00 GMT

I caught up with Pete LePage again, this in time in Barcelona. More importantly I caught up with him on my own turf at TechEd among all the wonderful IT Pros. Now he was the stranger in the strange land. We had a great conversation around how to think about Internet Explorer 8 and compatibility. BTW, yes that really is the Mediterranean Ocean behind us.

One of concepts we discussed in the interview was the x-ua compatible tag you can put in the HTTP Response Headers of your web servers. Look for a quick screencast to show how this is done in the near future. This metatag would affect all of the websites on the server:

"X-UA-Compatible value="IE=EmulateIE7"

Additionally the web developer can add a similar meta tag to the site or page. The fun question is what meta tag wins, if there is a conflict between the server, site, page or user setting? The answer is simple the page setting will always win in the case of a conflict.

Resources:

Great article on IE 8 and compatibility: Compatibility and Internet Explorer 8
Additional information for adding custom HTTP response headers on various versions of IIS and Apache servers:
IIS7.0, IIS6.0, Apache 2.2, Apache 2.0, Apache 1.3
Compatibly center: Internet Explorer Compatibility Center
Check out the first interview with Pete here:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Pete-LePage-Talking-IE-8-Tools--PDC/

Easy Steps to Get your Web Site to Support IE8

Neil Hutson — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:59:00 GMT

Any users accessing your site using the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) browser ( currently in Beta ) will typically not get a very good rendering experience if your site was designed for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) because of new standards that IE8 is supporting around HTML and CSS formats. There are two ways to resolve this.

1) The longer term option is to re-write your web application to render IE8 correctly - However this would not be my first choice.

2) The best ( to choose first off ) is to instruct any IE8 browsers to browse your site in IE7 emulation mode so that the current rendering is maintained. How do you do this? Simple

On a Per-site basis, site owners and administrators can include the following custom HTTP header to force Internet Explorer 8 to render Web pages like Internet Explorer 7:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7

To add a custom HTTP response header at the Web site level in Internet Information Services 7 on a Windows Server 2008-based computer, follow these steps:

Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
Under Connections, double-click the server that you want, and then double-click Sites.
Click the Web site where you want to add the custom HTTP response header.
Under Web site name Home, double-click HTTP Response Headers in the IIS section.
Note In this step, Web site name is the name of the Web site.
Under Actions, click Add.
In the Name box, type X-UA-Compatible.
In the Value box, type IE=EmulateIE7.
Click OK.

You can also modify the IIS7 configuration file with the following details ( or you can check the config after the changes made above )

<system.webServer>
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>

<add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=EmulateIE7" />

</customHeaders>

</httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

To add a custom HTTP response header at the Web site level in Internet Information Services 6 and earlier versions, follow these steps:

Click Start, click Run, type inetmgr.exe, and then click OK.
Expand the server that you want, and then expand Web Sites.
Right-click the Web site that you want, and then click Properties.
Under Custom HTTP headers, click Add.
In the Custom header name box, type X-UA-Compatible.
In the Custom header value box, type IE=EmulateIE7.
Click OK two times.

Per-page basis

Site owners and administrators can include the following special HTML tag after the <Head> tag on the page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The following example shows use of this Internet Explorer 7 compatibility mode tag on a per-page basis:

<html> <head> <!-- Use IE7 mode --> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> <title>My Web Page</title> </head> <body> <p>Content goes here.</p> </body> </html>

For more information about the EmulateIE7 tag, visit the IEBlog Web site:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/06/10/introducing-ie-emulateie7.aspx

To download IE8 for testing, you can go to the following location

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

Entries tagged with iis6 - TechNet Edge

Pete LePage and IE 8 Compatibility Interview @TechEd Barcelona

Easy Steps to Get your Web Site to Support IE8

Per-page basis