title: Ensuring strict mode in IE 8
body: <p>I'm apparently triggering quirks mode (or at least IE 7 standards mode) even though I've added the strict doctype:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the IE compatibility list meta:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've looked at the Developer Tools window for the page, and it says that the page default is IE 8 standards mode, but still renders the page wrongly. However, changing the mode in developer tools to another mode and <em>then</em> switching back to IE 8 standards mode causes the page to render correctly.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some other IE-specific incantation that I'm missing, or is this a known bug for IE 8 (or the IE Developer Tools)?</p>
  
  <p>If it helps, here are the first few lines of the page (Sorry I don't have a link to the page, it's a proprietary product that is intended for deployment on intranets). I've checked that nothing comes before the DOCTYPE (though that apparently is no longer an issue for IE 8):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
      &lt;html&gt;
        &lt;head&gt;
          &lt;meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;
          &lt;!-- to override ie compatibility mode for intranets: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/02/16/just-the-facts-recap-of-compatibility-view.aspx --&gt;
          &lt;meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" /&gt; 
  </code></pre>