IE8 document.compatMode

With all the proliferate hacks out there for IE browsers, IE8 stacks some more on top.

During our last release cycle our QA department started sending back issues revolving around the new IE8 browser. Many of these where related to javascript. One simple fix to get this out the door was to just force IE8 into compatibility mode until we had more time to deduce all the little issues. Unfortunately this fixed some issues while creating others, ugh.

Basically it boiled down to this. Our ASP application says that the browser is IE8, and in javascript it will also say that it is version eight, while in normal mode. The issue, when in compatibility mode, is that it still registers in ASP as IE version eight, but in javascript it now says it is version seven, or whatever compatibility mode is used. So additional IE specific code was added on top of already IE specific code to now check document.documentMode as well.

I do like working with IE8 much more than it's predecessors, but it is still not quite up to par which just adds more development time to now make things work in all the different, very different, flavors of IE.

Here's a good summary of things IE8 finally got right and others that are still not.

And VML also took a hit with the new browser.

Another issue with VML that I noticed the other day was that IE8 now supports element.hasAttribute/getAttribute. But I guess the support is not that great, at-least for VML.
I had a simple script that works with both SVG, the standard, and VML, the non-standard.
There was a method that did something like

if(elem.hasAttribute) { do standard SVG stuff here }
else { do non-standard VML here }

With IE8 the first condition will now be hit, which is good but also bad since IE doesn't support SVG. So yet more IE code was added to resolve this issue. I figured I'd take advantage of the newly getAttribute functionality in IE8 to get the 'fillColor' attribute of a VML element.

Well, this didn't quite exactly work. The attribute was never found. IE8 seems to only report a single attribute for every VML element regardless of how many are actually in the XML. So I could get the first attribute using the new 'getAttribute' in IE8, but unfortunately 'fillColor' was not the first attribute within my VML, so it was back to changing the code yet again for IE to ignore the newly added 'getAttribute' and go back to elem['attrib'] instead, since this would actually give me ALL of the attributes per element.

I guess this is what we have to look forward to until ver. 9 :)