Document Compatibility

The topics in this section help you understand, troubleshoot, and resolve compatibility issues that might appear in websites and HTML documents.

For more information, see Defining Document Compatibility.

In this section

Topic Description

About conditional comments

Here we introduce conditional comments, which offer advantages over scripted browser detection techniques. Conditional comments make it easy to detect earlier versions of Windows Internet Explorer. Conditional comments are the preferred means of differentiating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) rules intended for specific versions of Internet Explorer.

Defining document compatibility

Here you'll learn about the document compatibility modes supported by Internet Explorer and other popular browsers, and how to specify the document mode for a webpage.

Mark of the Web

When you are developing webpages, the Mark of the Web (MOTW) enables you to test your HTML documents in the security zone where you intend the pages to run. Adding the MOTW to your webpages also enables you to fully test their compatibility with users' security settings.

Understanding the Compatibility View List

Here we talk about the Compatibility View List, also known as the Compatibility List. You'll learn how the Compatibility View List was created, how to determine whether your site is in the list, and how to have your site removed from the list.

Understanding user-agent strings

Here we discuss the user-agent string, which identifies your browser and provides certain system details to servers hosting the websites you visit. We'll also learn how to view your user-agent string, understand tokens used by recent versions of Internet Explorer, and understand registry keys that affect the user-agent string.