The Insert/Remove the Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Tag feature

Does Your Site Look and Function As Well in Internet Explorer 8 as It Did In IE6?

It’s not hard to find Web pages that aren’t fully standards compliant. It’s also not difficult to find sites not optimized for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. So take advantage of it. This is the perfect time to bring your site up-to-date and beat everyone else to the top of the rankings.

Need another reason to update your site now? Microsoft's latest version of Explorer more closely supports industry standards than any previous version. Consequently, sites designed for older versions of the browser may not display as they’re intended- especially if they aren’t Web standards compliant.

In an effort to accommodate older sites, Internet Explorer 8 introduced the concept of document compatibility, which lets you specify the Internet Explorer versions that your site is designed to support.

The Solution

Document compatibility adds new modes to Internet Explorer 8. These modes tell the browser how to interpret and render a Web site. If your site does not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8, you can update the site to support the latest Web standards (the preferred solution) or you can add a Meta element to your pages. This element tells Internet Explorer 8 to render your site as if it were being viewed in an older version of the browser.

This feature gives you several options to use as your Meta tag.

  1. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=5" />

    Renders a page in quirks mode.

  2. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

    Renders the page in IE7 standards mode even if no DOCTYPE is present.

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

    Renders the page as IE7 does. This is the preferred compatibility mode.

  4. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

    Renders the page in the default Internet Explorer 8 and is the most standards compliant mode.

  5. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

    Prepares the page to render with any future IE version, always using the latest rendering engine.

The feature finds the head section of the selected document, folder or files and adds a compatibility Meta tag based on the option you choose. This Aggiorno feature also provides the capability of removing the Meta tag when requested by the user.

Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Tag Screenshot

Making your site compatible with an IE version is simple as adding a tag:

Before

<head>
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Classifieds Starter Kit Help</title>
...
</head>

After

<head>
   <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
   <title>Classifieds Starter Kit Help</title>
...
</head>

Learn more about inserting or removing Internet Explorer 8 compatibility tags at: