Why HTML1113: Document mode restart from IE9 Standards to Quirks
browser, internet-explorer, internet-explorer-9, quirks-mode
Solution
As no one jumps up to the occasion, I will answer the question myself. As paulsm4 indicated in comment to the question, it's the missing doctype which triggers quirks mode. See http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/ for an excellent overview of doctypes, browser types and resulting browser modes.
With respect to the funny string of Asian characters - I did some further research on this and discovered where it comes from. I opened a new file in UltraEdit, converted it from utf-8 to unicode first and then copied the text. The result in hex view reveals it all:
As we see, it's just the xml file uploaded, plus a preceding byte order mark FF FE, which according to wikipedia is a utf-16 Little Endian one:
Now for the messages in the console: the order of events in the browser is apparently as follows:
- get XML file
- get referred XSL file and apply transformation (XML5001); process result
- BOM = FF FE which is utf-16 overrides utf-8 mentioned in xml header (HTML1114)
- IE9 notices missing doctype, switches to quirks mode (HTML1113) and reloads result file again
- Again, BOM encoding overrides xml header encoding (HTML1114)
- File displayed
Problem
I open a webpage in IE9 - and all of a sudden the document mode switches to Quirks mode. The page itself is dead simple - no doctype, no meta tag, just a piece of (test purpose) javascript inside the xslt forming the page. See http://home.arcor.de/martin.honnen/xslt/test2012041901.xml using the mentioned xsl on the same location. For convenience I copied the contents below. Page content is ``` <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="test2012041901.xsl"?> <test/> ``` And xsl contains ``` <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0" xmlns:ms="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:my="http://example.com/my" exclude-result-prefixes="ms my"> <xsl:output method="html" version="5.0"/> <ms:script language="JScript" implements-prefix="my"> <![CDATA[ function tokenize (input) { var doc = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0'); var fragment = doc.createDocumentFragment(); var tokens = input.split(';'); for (var i = 0, l = tokens.length; i < l; i++) { var item = doc.createElement('item'); item.text = tokens[i]; fragment.appendChild(item); } return fragment.selectNodes('item'); } ]]> </ms:script> <xsl:template match="/"> <html> <head> <title>Example</title> </head> <body> <h1>Example</h1> <ul> <xsl:apply-templates select="my:tokenize('Kibology;for;all')"/> </ul> </body> </html> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="item"> <li> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </li> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> ``` Why does this happen? Is it an internet options setting that triggers this? How can I prevent quirks mode being automatically chosen in IE9? And: earlier with the same page this automatic quirks mode did not occur - I must have done something, like a setting change, maybe even just forth and back to the original value again, which led to this changed behavior. But what? F12 developer tools show the following in the console: ``` XML5001: Applying Integrated XSLT Handling. HTML1114: Codepage unicode from (UNICODE byte order mark) overrides conflicting codepage utf-8 from (10) test2012041901.xml HTML1113: Document mode restart from IE9 Standards to Quirks test2012041901.xml HTML1114: Codepage unicode from (UNICODE byte order mark) overrides conflicting codepage utf-8 from (10) test2012041901.xml ``` Not sure what the byte order mark message is all about - maybe that's related to the issue? Oh and dev tools also show this in the script part: ``` 㼼浸敶獲潩㵮ㄢ〮•湥潣楤杮∽呕ⵆ∸㸿㰊砿汭猭祴敬桳敥⁴祴数∽整瑸砯汳•牨晥∽整瑳〲㈱㐰㤱砮汳㼢ਾ琼獥⽴ਾ ``` Note that all this only happens with newly opened tabs, not existing ones in quirks mode already.