IE 8 and Version Targeting
Will IE 8 recognize IE 7 conditional comments when set to render in IE 7 standards mode? The answer is no.
The Question
The test box below should be 100px x 100px with a blue background in all browsers except for IE 7. In IE 7, the box should be 200px x 100px with a red background. What I'm curious to know is if IE 8, set to render in IE 7's standards mode via the following meta declaration <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />, will recognize IE 7 conditional comments. My assumption (and my hope!) is that IE 8 will.
The Test
The Result
While I'm not technically sure if this is a feature or a bug, given my assumption, I have to say that IE 8 Beta 1 (8.0.6001.17184) running on Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1 fails the test. When IE 8 is running as IE 8, the box is blue, regardless of the version targeted. When IE 8 is emulating IE 7*, the box is red, regardless of the version targeted. In my opinion, this is not intuitive and will lead to more sites being "broken," since IE 7 conditional stylesheets will not get served to IE 8 even if IE 7 is targeted.
Last update—28 March 2008
* I'm also not sure if the emulate IE 7 functionality
(
) will be part of the gold release.
