IEStandards.xml requests

Oct 26, 2010 misc-web

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

The other day, I saw some 404 errors for the file IEStandards.xml in my error logs. After a little research, I found some links here and here that lead me to believe that I had done something wrong. Let me explain…

The site I created uses an extensive amount of javascript. For some reason, Internet Explorer was not allowing this site to function correctly - only on certain instances of IE8. It was disallowing an AJAX submission and instead, redirecting the page with a popup warning information bar. Grrr!

I did some research and found out that I needed to set IE8 to emulate IE8. I did so by entering the following tag into the head of my document:

<meta content="IE=EmulateIE8" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible">

Problem solved. It worked for the user and we moved on. However, it appears that IE was actually sending an additional request now… or at least I think that was happening. I was seeing the 404’s for the IEStandards.xml file.

I believe the solution is a two fold solution, now. It is necessary to use the meta tag AND have the resulting IEStandards.xml file in place.

IEStandards.xml

<ie8standardsmode></ie8standardsmode>

I think this is the complete solution - before I had just “patched” it. The documents always made it seem like it was one or the other - not both. Anyone know if I’m correct?