Matthew Knott

Just when you think that with IE9 coming in, people will finally be able to appreciate your effort in progressive enhancement, then bam, the rug is pulled from under your feet.

Much of our SharePoint site, thanks to Capita's Sims Learning Gateway (SLG) runs in Quirks Mode. This is because they only tested with a default SharePoint deployment, choosing not to consider those of use who might want to drag SharePoint somewhere near web standards.

Had Capita tested what happens when you have a doctype (yes, just a sodding doctype) declared, they would see that almost all their webparts fall to pieces. It's shocking, their approach to some of their webparts is simply astounding.

Anyway, so most of our site is running in Quirks Mode, yet the css3 properties we've set on different items, mainly subtle border-radius and box-shadow don't render in IE9 when the page is running in Quirks Mode. As soon as a Doctype is present, hey presto, curves.

It's really frustrating, and just increases my loathing for SLG (I didn't think that was possible).