That’s my understanding, unless I’m missing something. Seems like a very odd decision, to me.
WOW, an iframe for lightbox crap? Who came up with that?!?
Oh, same type of person who probably LIKES lightbox style effects – where if it weren’t for middle-clicking I’d be screaming at the display “lands sake just let me open the blasted image” (just with more expletives)
So… why is it using an Iframe instead of creating a DOM image element, waiting for it’s onload, and putting it into a DIV like a normal person would? Just dying to have it still work in Nyetscape 4 or something?
It’s just a weird little side extension of what started out life as an image viewer, like for photo albums. Then users wanted to be able to have non-image stuff appear, so the basic model got extended to HTML content.
Pay a visit to highslide.com to see what it’s about. Not my application, so please don’t complain to me about how it’s implemented. It’s simply what I’m working with.
I did, that’s how I figured out it was mediocre lightbox-style nonsense… Which is something I wouldn’t put on a website in the first place… and is blocked from working in my primary browser.
Does the problem persist if the framed source emits a X-UA-Compatible, IE-9 header?
Well, I’m not real sure about this, and I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anyone is telling you that you’re required to use it.
I’ll be sure to inform everyone else in the world that you’ve decreed that this is an unacceptable way to present images.
When I’m asked to help people (see the jAlbum forums), I help if I can. I try to avoid making any comments about what I think of the esthetics of the site in question. It’s not relevant.
Kinda tough to test. It’s one of those things that rears its ugly head only when the framed source is something like a “quirks” site, and the parent isn’t. The situation that pretty much everyone appears to be talking about is the one in which the parent is fully modern, IE9-compliant, strict, brave, clean, and reverent, and the framed source is some chunk of unavoidable legacy code.
It’s also tough to find a clear description of what’s happening. Almost all of the discussions of the issue revolve around the content of the child (the framed source), and how to make it compatible. That’s all well and good if you have control over that source. But when you’re framing someone else’s page, it is what it is, alas.
An interesting chart: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/misc/How%20IE9%20Determines%20Document%20Mode.svg
I’m not convinced that this is what IE9 is actually doing, however. My admittedly crude experiments seem to indicate otherwise.
(I can’t shake the feeling that the corresponding chart for FF would consist of a single box labeled, “Render the damned page.” 
)
Firefox has its own Quirks and Standard modes as well.
Sigh. I was being facetious. Notice the little “winking” smiley?
Of course FF has to be capable of operating in different modes. But the IE developers have, repeatedly, taken the whole issue to spectacular heights of complication. For this, I am not grateful.
Why? If it wasn’t for that, they wouldn’t be able to comply with standards like they do now. The situation would be a lot worse.
The iframe thing is odd, and according to that flowchart, a bug, but that aside, the compatibility modes enabled IE to be much better than it otherwise would have been.
Well, they only have to take it to such heights because IE was so extraordinarily bad to begin with.
It wasn’t though. It was the best browser on the market when each version was released. By modern standards, it’s horrible - but that’s as a result of MS abandoning the project and concentrating on .NET after IE6, and a lot of user’s inability to stay up to date with software.
MS only had to do all this because of the compatibility of the browser. They were a victim of their own success in a way!
True, though at this point the IE developers are like people in rehab. They’re doing their best to be upstanding citizens, but can’t completely erase the bankruptcies and broken marriages they left behind.
Don’t know about iFrames but I have a JavaScript LightBox app (displays graphics) in my clients website that stalls IE9 when you want to view the graphics. It works in Compatibility mode though, IE8, Firefox etc. I guess we have a lot of websites to re-write!
That’s true, I guess. I do remember the IE vs. Netscape wars years ago and IE did always win because you could do a lot more with it.
I actually don’t really know why they still insist on having IE (well, at least why they insist on Trident). I can’t see, from a marketing/business perspective what real benefit they gain instead of just using others and focusing their money on something else. Does IE9 actually make a profit?
It was the best browser on the market when each version was released.
Bah! 6 maybe… I’ll give 6 slack. But 7 and 8?? They were behind the times before they were even release candidates! No :focus in IE7??? A decade-long in the specs (along with all the other CSS2.1 crap)?? Srsly IEfail…
[ot]
The only thing I actually like about lightboxy stuffs is, if there’s a crapload of thumbnails, I do like being able to click a next or prev link… not that you need a lightbox for that, but most sites with them I click the images and hit the back button and click the next image and hit the back button… which inspired me to learn the keyboard shortcuts for those things in my browser, lawlz, cause that’s also irritating.
The waiting 10 minutes for some box to grow and then gently fade in the image is the reason I block lightboxes and Javascript in general. Christ, that’s maybe the most frustrating way to show images on your web site. ARRRRG[/ot]
I’m sure it must do… It’s part of the whole tie-in to the windows experience for them as well.
No, 7 and 8 were MS playing catch-up, which means they had to introduce all this compatibility mode stuff. IE7 is dying now anyway, hopefully by the end of the year we can start ignoring that too as well!
Oh the irony of it all (now where’s that damned emoticon that shows me shedding a tear…)
I just commented on Craig Buckler’s blog entry (regarding the launch of IE9) and my comment was something to the effect of that IE9 really doesn’t change the fact that we have to deal with all of the counter effects of IE7 (and IE8 to a small degree) because it’s exclusive to Win Vista and up and that in a best case scenario, IE9 wouldn’t introduce its own quirks. Oh well… I guess that was too much to expect.