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Compatibility View Improvements to come in IE8 [blogs.msdn.com]The next public update of IE8 (for Windows Vista- and Windows XP-based operating systems as well as the Windows 7 Beta) includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users when they visit web sites that are not yet ready for IE8’s new, more standards-compliant defaults. This blog post describes the technical background and how this new functionality works.
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Despite all the outreach to sites, we saw from the telemetry data that IE8 Beta 2 users still have to use Compatibility View a lot. Looking at our instrumentation, there were high-volume sites like facebook.com, myspace.com, bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com with pages that weren’t working for end-users with IE’s new standards compliant default. We could also see from our instrumentation that not all IE8 visitors to those sites were clicking the Compatibility View button. So, large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren’t aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work.
They had to find a way to cross the divide between IE6 and 7's "almost but not quite" CSS rendering and, finally, lining up with FF's and Opera's interpretations of the CSS spec - and do it without breaking every page in sight. Can't say I could come up with anything better.
The following meta-tag is pretty much all-purpose and will keep IE8 working just the same as IE7. Quirks pages (with no doctype) will work as before, and if there is a doctype and IE7 is rendering the page in Standards Mode, it will show up as it always has:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=emulateIE7" />
You can also implement this on the server side. Plenty of info on MSDN and the IE Blog.
