HTML quirks doctype

Question

Hi All,
As far as I know, WebLogic Portal 8.1 has "standards compliance" Look and Feels out-of-the-box. And WebLogic Portal 9.2 has "legacy" Look and Feel, which renders HTML in "quirks" mode.
And we have problems with that, because HTML content of our remote portlet (accessed via wsrp) is not "standards mode" compatible and thus not properly displayed on out-of-the-box Look and Feels.
Does anybody faced problem like this? And what is the best solution? Develop custom "quirks" Look and Feel? Or is there any other "quirks" Look and Feel (except "legacy") that can be used for such purpose?
Please share your expirence.
Thanks in advance,
Dzianis

Answer 1

Hi Walter,
I don't remember the reasons to choose this DOCTYPE. Maybe we did not
consider all options. At any rate, the DOCTYPE has to work with all
supported browsers as the same HTML code is delivered to all of them, so
changing it would require thorough testing.
If you think there are good reasons to change it, please open a bug in
bugzilla. This way, your points won't get lost.
Regards, Ralf
Walter Rumsby wrote:
> There are no rendering issues with IE8, but that's to be expected
> because the DOCTYPE triggers quirks mode rendering. You may be using
> IE8, but since it's pretending to be IE7 in quirks mode the experience
> should be the same as for IE7.
>
> However, it is possible to force IE8 to use IE8 Standards Mode rendering
> either via the Developer Tools or if you configure your web
> server/servlet container to set the X-UA-Compatible header to IE=8.
> Using the Developer Tools I forced the use of IE8 Standards Mode and
> didn't notice any issues, although I didn't perform any indpeth testing.
>
> The reason I noticed the DOCTYPE was that I was trying to work out why a
> widget in our RAP-based application that relies on excanvas worked when
> I used IE8 - it shouldn't have been working since all but the latest
> version of the library do not work with IE8 (as expected the widget
> didn't work when using IE8 Standards Mode). If RAP used a DOCTYPE that
> triggered standards mode the behaviour would be different and
> applications in the Internet Zone would render in IE8 Standards Mode (by
> default applications in the Intranet Zone would render in IE7
> Compatibility Mode).
>
> My interest in any possible change to the DOCTYPE and rendering mode is
> because we've developed some inhouse guidelines for developers, support
> and QA around ensuring IE8 support and having a better understanding
> RAP's direction here would help with guidelines specifically for parts
> of our application suite that rely on RAP.
>