In the SharePoint branding & development communities, there has recently been a lot of buzz around the use of HTML5 features in SharePoint. Solutions like Kyle Schaeffer’s “v5.master“, or Bind templates are being deployed, and this has me a little concerned.

In my testing with IE9, I have found that various pieces of functionality do not work as expected with these solutions. The reason for this is as follows: SharePoint 2010′s IE9 support was tested and developed for IE9 running in IE8 compatibility mode, but these solutions typically disable the compatibility mode, breaking basic SharePoint functionality in the process.

Specifically, the tag…

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"/>

… has been either removed, or changed to one of these alternatives…

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9"/>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>

It would be great if this worked, but the unfortunate truth is that there are various pieces of critical SharePoint functionality which simply don’t work if this is changed. Continue reading →