Get ready for Internet Explorer 8

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Monday, November 10, 2008

Microsoft is currently preparing to release a new version of its Internet Explorer web browser. Version 8 is set to be released for all Windows users early in 2009, meaning that web masters may have some work to do now to ensure that their websites will display correctly in the new browser.

How IE8 affects your website
With IE8, Microsoft has enhanced how the web browser displays and renders websites. Previously, the company had been criticised for not complying with internet standards for HTML and CSS; the languages used to create websites. Within the latest version, however, the company claims to have massively improved web standards support, bringing Internet Explorer in line with web browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome.

This brings a problem: your website may break in the new version of Internet Explorer. Luckily though, there’s an easy fix that you can put into your HTML:

The easy fix
Somewhere between your <head></head> tags of every page on your website, insert the following snippet of XHTML:

< meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

This tells Internet Explorer 8 to build your website exactly how it did in IE7.

The advanced fix
For the most part, your website will only break if it doesn’t adhere to web standards. If you hand code your website, we always recommend developing your site using CSS and XHTML standards to ensure that your website is future proofed.

Find out more at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956197

Should you wish to check your website, the web browser "Opera" has built in debug and validation tools that make checking your website very easy. You can download Opera from http://www.opera.com

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