SharePoint Quirks Mode? Booooooo!

To understand my plight, you need to understand DOCTYPE. Basically, long ago IE and others agreed to certain standards and behavior. That was a huge step for standards, and played a big role in making today's modern AJAX components possible. When they did it, they needed to preserve backwards compatibility. So, HTML pages need to include the DOCTYPE at the top, which basically indicates the version of HTML the browser behaves for. It's simple, and most modern pages include it. In fact, it's included in all new ASPX pages in Visual Studio by default:

< ! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" >


If you don't have that line, browsers will go into Quirks Mode, where all the old idiosynchrasies are present. In Grid FX, we have popups and perform certain layout operations that Quirks Mode chokes on. No big deal, because we just told people to add that above line at the top of the page, which they should be doing anyway. So you'd think a very major web-based portal system like SharePoint would surely include it, right? Nope!

SharePoint, even the latest version, doesn't include that line. And if you do in fact include it, all of SharePoint's menus go wacky, because they have designed the system around all that screwed up old crap. Seriously? This is pathetic. Really pathetic.

Even controls written under ASP.NET AJAX won't work, because some don't behave correctly in Quirks Mode. Why would you worry about that when it's been many years since they changed the browsers? Can't they just change SharePoint? Yeah, sure. Best of luck.

What really sucks is that we need to have Grid FX work in SharePoint. People have already been asking about it. So now I gotta go through everything and make it work in Quirks Mode. I'm going to fly to Redmond, poop in a bag, light it, and set it on the step of the SharePoint building.