In EVEN THE MOST RECENT VERSION OF INTERNET EXPLORER, if you are using the iframe tag, it will not display correctly – it will insert a free horizontal scroll bar no matter what – UNLESS you do two things (both of which are technically (AND MORALLY) WRONG WRONG WRONG) to the page displayed INSIDE the iframe:
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Declare the doctype as ONLY EITHER HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL -OR- HTML 4.1 TRANSITIONAL …REGARDLESS OF HOW YOUR PAGE VALIDATES!
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DO NOT include a URI to the document type definition, i.e. even if you obey #1, <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”> will not work! Only <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”> will.
OF COURSE, this will render your XHTML STRICT page as COMPLETE SHITE in every other, compliant, browser.
…now, iframes are stupid to begin with, and not XHTML valid (I don’t think?), but this entry needs some Googlejuice, so if anyone is in the same situation I just was, they can avoid the hours of trial-and-error…I did not find this anywhere in the vast amount of IE assery documentation.
Update 12/2/2005
found this, 4 days later, while looking into CSS inheritance problems in IE
Upon investigating more, I think this is due to iframe pages inheriting from their parents…kinda makes sense. And the HTML doctype declarations weren’t originally meant to have dtd URIs included, turns out…As you can see in Table 1, some of the DOCTYPEs have URIs and some do not. This is not a hard rule: Any DOCTYPE can have a URI or leave it off. Thus, they were included at random in the examples shown in the table. As you’ll see later, however, the presence or absence of a DOCTYPE URI can affect which rendering mode gets picked. # Also see Table 2. It’s all becoming clear now. Sad news, I can’t use CSS like I’m used to because these pages will never validate/render- in-anything-besides-quirks-mode.
Interesting side note: Visual Studio automatically make new web pages HTML Transitional with no URI, and I think it automatically puts in weird markup and/or attributes that force it immediately down to that (i.e so that the page will be rendered in quirks mode).