I recently posted a question regarding a member of the forum I run, who's complaining that the reply page layout is messed up - it's now transpired that this is only since he upgraded to IE8.

I've viewed the page in question on two computers and three different browsers, and this is what I found:

PC 1 - Firefox, fine. IE7, fine
PC 2 - IE8 (upgraded yesterday), overlapping layout problem as described by the afore mentioned forum member.

I'm already using an 'If IE' hack in my coding, to bring the layout of the reply page into shape for IE users, but what can I do for IE8 users?

And why is this happenening anyway? I thought IE8 was MS answer to FF and Chrome?

Thanks in advance.

PS My forum can be found here: http://www.runboard.com/bored472 - no need to register if you want to take a look at the 'leave a reply' page.

You may want to target only IE7 and under. As said, IE8 should render like the good guys. Your conditional statement should look like this to do so:

<!--[if lt IE8]>
/* your under IE8 stuff here */
<![endif]-->

This way your IE8 users won't get your IE special fixes.

Any more info on conditional statements:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html

Thanks, racer, but I've just been told by someone on my forum that there's another way. I was just about to come here and explain that I'd fixed it, but you beat me to it.

IE8 has something called a 'compatibilty view'. You hit that and it resolves any layout and/or compatibility issues, and then remembers the settings for that website next time around. It fixed the problem for me, anyway.

For all I know, this compatibilty view tool may be nothing new and might even have been a feature for the earlier versions of IE.

Do you think I still need to use that 'if It IE8' hack, racer?

Originally Posted by Billy

For all I know, this compatibilty view tool may be nothing new and might even have been a feature for the earlier versions of IE.

Do you think I still need to use that 'if It IE8' hack, racer?

Compatibility view is new to IE8

You will still need to address the issue. IE8 is being rolled out right now, so more and more people will be using it over the coming months and it will default to IE8 mode by default - you can guarantee that a lot of people won't remember about the view button.

Before you use that compatibility thing, you should read this:
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...about-ie8.html

As far as I know IE7 hacks don't affect IE8. At least none of the ones I've tested do, and none of the common ones do. This means if you absolutely have to target IE8 specifically, you must use a conditional comment. However, before you do that, I would try to work out a solution without making a separate stylesheet.

So far, my experience shows me that although there are sometimes minor differences between IE8 and Firefox (if you're using CSS3 stuff for example), these differences are not bad, and can usually be solved by simplifying your code, much like you would for differences between Safari and Firefox.

The less complex your code is the better.