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Monday, 24th March 2008, No Comments »

I enjoy being wrong

However, as a web designer, I’m now sighing with yet another rendering engine to test, which from some accounts is so vastly different it breaks almost every site. So what now faithful reader (all 12 of you), our sites are horribly broken in IE8 what ever shall we do? Easy, targeted rendering is our new best friend!

No really, we know IE8 is coming, we’re been playing with the beta. We’ve worked out we don’t have the time, resources, budget or will power to fix our sites until the final is released, but targeted versioning will give us the time we need to fix these things correct when we get our all ducks in a row.

Hows this gonna work?

At this point you, may question my sanity and ask “how in hades am I going to apply this render meta tag to all my trillion static webpages across 300 domains?”

Your not, your web server will do that for you. Believe it or not, IE8’s version targeting comes in two delicious flavors, the meta-tag which everyone is familiar with and as an HTTP header. “X-UA-Compatible: IE=7″ in effect can be applied across an entire site within a few minutes, setting IE8 to render your site as if it was IE7, all other browsers will rightly ignore it and continue on with it’s day.

I do this how?

For apache you’ll need mod_headers installed, then it’s as easy as adding Header: set X-UA-Compatible: IE=7 to your config.

I personally haven’t so much as looked IIS direction in a few years, so here’s some official looking Microsoft documentation Add a Custom HTTP Response Header. Hopefully this will help those who are hitting the top result for IE8 OWA in Google.