September 4, 2002
Almost Standard / Quirks
David Baron has written an interesting set of articles on the three possible rendering modes in the latest Mozilla-based releases and what triggers each: Full Standards Mode, Almost Standards Mode, and Quirks Mode. His Mozilla's DOCTYPE sniffing article lists the doctype triggers for each mode, Mozilla's Quirks Mode introduces the concept of and Mozilla Quirks Mode Behavior details many of the quirks themselves.
Almost Standards Mode is new to Mozilla 1.01 and above (includes AOL for OS X, Netscape 7, and Mozilla 1.1). This new mode was created to allow for better compatibility with existing sites while still closely following the standards.
From David Baron's BugZilla Patch Summary:
It changes our behavior so that we use the quirks mode line-height algorithm in AlmostStandards mode. In all other respects, AlmostStandards mode is the same as FullStandards mode.
This can be seen with screengrabs [png(33k) or gif(44k)] of IBM's homepage using Mozilla 1.0 and Mozilla 1.1. The IBM pages use a special special dtd that triggers Almost Standards Mode in Mozilla 1.1, which then displays the page with the line-height IE would.
Posted by Lewis Francis at September 4, 2002 12:00 AMListed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Almost Standard / Quirks' from Information Gift.
