First of all thank you very much for the very informative comment. I think I haven’t heard anything about that that quirks mode before but I must say that for my part, even though you stated that having illegal content before the doctype has the same effect as an invalid doctype or having no doctype at all, I still consider it “harmless” by the mere basis that the validator accepted it without any warnings.

I have tried using an XML declaration before but it didn’t turn out valid when I checked it. I didn’t know if there was only a typo but one thing’s for sure: from that day until today, I haven’t used it again and stuck to the meta tag instead. Lastly, I think there are still a lot of IE users out there who use 6.

The W3C specification for XHTML states “There must be a DOCTYPE declaration in the document prior to the root element” (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/#s2.1)

Now exactly how this is interpreted, differs (of course) between browsers. Most browsers will allow most whitespace characters before the doctype, though Internet Explorer (versions 6 – 8b2) and Opera will not allow a non-breaking space (Alt-0160). Firefox and Safari will allow anything that is not a tag (for example ), even plain text. Internet Explorer (all versions) will not allow comments before the doctype either, but all other browsers do.

Having illegal content before the doctype has the same effect as an invalid doctype or having no doctype at all; the page is interpreted in quirks (backwards compatibility) mode.

Now, back to the horizontal scrollbar. I have also witnessed this, it happens in Internet Explorer 6 with iframes (and normal frames?) where the content is forced to 100% wide, and the content document is standards compliant. (Clearly a bug in IE6’s standards compliance.)

What now, if you don’t want that scrollbar, but still needs pages that can be tested for standard compliance? Internet Explorer 6, in all it’s wisdom, does not even allow an XML declaration (for example ) before the doctype. All other browsers I tested, including newer versions of IE, do allow the XML declaration. So just add an XML declaration before the doctype of the iframe contents document, and you will not have a horizontal scrollbar anymore. Of course, this may mean you will have to deal with other weirdness in the document because it’s rendered in quirks mode in IE6 (only)….

Some more info about quirks mode:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/quirks-mode.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/

I’m really pleased to finally hear from someone who also finds this little ‘fix’ effective.

Glad to be of help, machan. 🙂

Woah.

ooh, Good luck with the exaaaammmm!!!! :cheerful: :angel: 😉

good luck with your exam. 🙂

Today is Ash Wednesday, but I’m not going to the church. 🙁 I’m becoming the devil. — that made me LOL. xD