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Peter van Mil
30-May-2013, 05:01 AM
Hi Dennis,

The forum doesn't work fine with IE10. If you add dataaccess.com to sites for compatibility, the level is swiched for all DAW websites to IE7:(:(:(.

In that case you run into trouble with the demo site for Dynamic AI reports.

Can this line added to the header of the forum?????



<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9">

Dennis Piccioni
30-May-2013, 08:48 AM
Hi Peter,

I'll discuss it with our network administrator.

Larry R Pint
30-May-2013, 09:12 AM
Instead of adding dataaccess.com to the compatibility list, could you add support.dataaccess.com? That would limit what sites it is applied to. I have not used IE10, so I don't know if this is possible or if it would work. Just tossing out an idea.

A Paul Anthony
30-May-2013, 09:39 AM
The X-UA-Compatible property is wrong for all kinds of reasons, not least because documents are already self describing as to what standard they're following, that's what the DOCTYPE (1) is for - you shouldn't have to second guess the browsers rendering engine as well! MS screwed this up for us with annoyingly persistent dodgy practises initiated by IE6 that dug themselves a hole. Their solution: "compatibility mode", which basically means having has a dodgy browser that ignored standards and did its own thing (2), due to its significant user-share a precedent has been set so lets have a feature of "interpret the document as IE6 did, warts and all". Yeah, that'll fix the problem...

Taken from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx which is painful to read:
"There was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way. Because sites expected IE6 behaviour, the DOCTYPE switch failed to protect compatibility in the real world when we changed behaviour under standards mode to become more compliant. We realized that “Don’t Break the Web” should really be translated to “Don’t change what developers expect IE to do for current pages that are already deployed.”

To get back on point, if the DOCTYPE can't perform its function for IE, what can a developer do to ensure that documents are interpreted correctly? That's where X-UA-Compatible comes in; it's a solution for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Rather relying of specifying a document version, you can specify a BROWSER version.

Except that's broken too. The IE8/9 pretending to be IE6 doesn't actually render pages the same as IE6. I checked. Emulated compatability with IE7 though is pretty good, though (3). The real problem however is "Intranet" mode. Even when you've done all of the right things with the document, it'll still render in Quirks mode. See the footnote under Table 2 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/askie/archive/2009/03/23/understanding-compatibility-modes-in-internet-explorer-8.aspx


I'd argue that all of the above is trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than trying to make browsers backwards compatible, we should be making documents forwards compatible. After all, old but valid HTML isn't suddenly going become invalid - the standard is designed to be progressively enhanced. The W3C obviously thought so too and so HTML5 has a "short form" doctype of simply <!DOCTYPE html>. In essence this is the same old doctype as before, only without the additional arguments that point to version specific Document Type Definition. It has the added benefit of triggering standards mode (which is what it should do) for all browsers, including IE6(!) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Quirks_Mode_and_Standards_Mode. When you want to take advantage of new features for HTML7, just add them in! Otherwise don't. Documents written today adhering to standards will still be just as valid then. (If we ever get there)

So if the DOCTYPE is forward compatible. Wouldn't it be a backward step to be version specific for X-UA-Compatible? I think so. To that end, rather than have a value of "IE=9", use "IE=edge" instead. Though the propertly has the potential to list other browsers and their versions, no other browser actually cares.

A word of warning. Adding X-UA-Compatible via a meta tag doesn't work consistently. At least not in my experiance with "Intranet forces quirks" issue. I tried simply adding a META element with X-UA-Compatible to my document but it had no effect. IE was rendered my document in Quirks regardless. The same site, same page but view over internet was fine (we have multiple NICs and routings). I have a theory that IE makes the decision as to what browser mode to user BEFORE it's actually parsed the document, at least with the "Intranet" thing, so setting the version in the document in already too late. Adding it as an "HTTP Response Headers header" in IIS for the site works fine.

tldr:
1) Use <!DOCTYPE html>
2) Set up a default a HTTP header of X-UA-Compatible "IE=edge"


1 This page for example uses <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> but is served as "text/html" which kinda proves my point as these pieces of information tell me everything I need to know about the document - it's a specific version of HTML with aspirations of XML. There's more to it of course, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#media

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

3 Compatibility with IE7 would have to be good as it's used whenever a developer embeds a webbrowser control into an application. Yes, you read that right. Regardless as to what version of IE is installed on a workstation, the cWebBrowser control always emulates IE7. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/03/10/more-ie8-extensibility-improvements.aspx.

Dennis Piccioni
30-May-2013, 10:20 AM
Hi Peter,

while we are looking into this, I wanted to bring up another point: numerous times when other issues with the forum software have come up, the problem has been with IE. I haven't used IE for browsing in years, I pretty much use Firefox and it just works.

A Paul Anthony
30-May-2013, 10:30 AM
It's pretty much thanks to FF that we're not all still using IE6. FF1 release late 2004 and a little over a year later IE7 is released. Coincidence? I think not. IE6 was already 3 years old at that point and was showing no signs of development

Here's a pretty chart showing these timelines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg. It's quite illuminating. How many different browsers have YOU used?

Peter van Mil
30-May-2013, 04:09 PM
I have tried to add support.dataaccess.com, but it will be changed in dataaccess.com. For people who are using IE, this might be a solution.

Dennis Piccioni
11-Jun-2013, 12:16 PM
Hi Peter,

can you be more specific about what is not working? Our network admin and I were looking at it and it apepars fine, but neither of us uses IE as our main browser, so we just did some minimal testing.

Focus
11-Jun-2013, 12:31 PM
Just try replying to a post.....when you hit enter nothing happens ..... ie you don't get a new line ....

Dennis Piccioni
11-Jun-2013, 01:20 PM
Testing. Ok, confirmed.

Clicking on the compatibility view button at the top of the browser (next to the address bar) fixes this for me.

chuckatkinson
11-Jun-2013, 02:36 PM
It's a know problem with IE10. Seen it here before in the forum.

Peter van Mil
11-Jun-2013, 02:40 PM
Dennis.

If you fix it that way, all sites of dataaccess.com are in compatibility mode. That isn't funny when you try to run websites as http://demo.dataaccess.com/VDF_DynamicAI/index.html. Than you get an error that the minimal version of IE is version 8. Compatibility mode switches IE back to version 7.

So using compatibility mode for the forums causes problems with the demo websites of DAW.

Dennis Piccioni
11-Jun-2013, 03:00 PM
Ok. We'll probably have to check with vBulletin on this.

Peter van Mil
11-Jun-2013, 03:34 PM
A real solution without compatibility mode would be better :).

Dennis Piccioni
11-Jun-2013, 03:37 PM
We are looking into it, but the forum is running vBulletin, not our software.

Stephen W. Meeley
11-Jun-2013, 03:54 PM
Peter,

We're still looking into this but it appears that the version of VBulletin we use uses a version of CKEditor that in incompatible with IE10. It also appears (but we have not confirmed) that newer versions of VBulletin use newer versions of CKEditor that solve this. Lastly, we saw a reference to the same meta "fix" (essentially "act like IE9") you posted earlier in this thread. That is likely what we will try first - but again - none of this has been tried yet. We'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, you can use F12 to go into "browser mode IE10 / document mode IE9" (works but doesn't survive exiting the browser) or switch the editor into source mode and work that way.

Neither of those are optimal, but as Dennis mentioned, we are dealing with OPS (at two levels deep).

Garret Mott
11-Jun-2013, 09:06 PM
On another VBulletin form I frequent, someone noticed that some settings got changed (no one knew why) by IE10. Go to Settings, General Settings & scroll down to Miscellaneous Options. There are 3 radios for differing editor styles. Try playing with those & see if it helps.

Long shot - but maybe worth a try?