Web Design For Internet Explorer 8

Hello everyone!

For those of you who don’t know, Internet Explorer 8.0 RC1 (Release Candidate – almost a final version) is now available and can be downloaded here(be careful to not install it on your working machine but on a virtual one ).

This is good news for all web designers and developers because IE8 is announced to be (for the very first time) a standard-oriented browser!

But (there is always a but) in case it won’t be as “standard-oriented” as Firefox is, Microsoft implemented two modes to render web pages: a “standard” mode and a “IE7″ mode. By default, all pages will be rendered with the “standard” renderer, but if you want you can add a specific META tag that will tell the browser to render your pages with the “IE7 renderer”! That way you won’t have to make any additional changes to your design code.

Here’s the META tag:

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

You can find more information here (take a look at the developers section).

Enjoy! (or not )