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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Are the CSS/HTML enhancements finally making it into Quirks mode in these new IE releases as well? That was one of the worst issues with IE8 and 7 for us as a company that builds widgets and scripts that need to work on every page on the web.

We're stuck without guaranteed support for position:fixed on any IE version because we can't guarantee that the underlying page uses a modern DOCTYPE.

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Huh? Quirks mode is never going to change; by definition, it is to maintain backwards compatibility. If a webpage was coded back in 2000, we don't want to break those pages simply because a more modern version of the browser is available.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Overview

If you want to check for a browser version, there are some best practices around it. This should help: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibili...

In summary, use object detection when possible, and if that does not work for you, use something similar to:

  <!--[if lte IE 7]> 
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie.css" /> 
  <![endif]-->

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