Viewing the source of the homepage reveled that there were unexpected linebreaks at the top of the document.

This suggested that there was something wrong with the index.php file or the header.php file of the WordPress theme.  However, viewing the RSS feed gave the following error:
 

And looking at the source…

And finally, when I tried to submit a post through Windows Live Writer, I got the following error:

Navigating to the xmlrpc page…

(Clearly I can’t just look at the page through a browser, but there are those strange linebreaks anyway.)

Here I was left scratching my head wondering what might be inserting these mystery linebreaks.  I even wrote a little test.php file to make sure the server wasn’t doing it.

The problem?  Linebreaks after the closing php tags in included php files.  The main culprit: plugins.

As a test I could type “hello, world” where I have highlighted, and it would appear in every HTML page and RSS feed served by my WordPress blog. >.<  For this to truly make sense, you’d need to know about PHP’s include function.

So I disabled all my pluggins and re-enabled them one-by-one to find the offending pluggins.  Counterize II was the only one.  I used WordPress’s built-in plugin editor to fix Counterize II’s code.

My wp-config.php files was also an offender.

*sigh* problem solved.

Why should web developers be happy?  Internet Explorer 8 is the most standards-compliant version of IE yet.  That means less time writing “special” code for IE and more time adding polish.  End users should like some new features such as accelerators, improved speed, an improved favorites bar, and especially new search features.

My favorite feature is search suggestions from within the search box.  This is especially great for when I don’t know exactly what to Google for.

For more information check out Paul Thurott’s review of Internet Explorer 8.

IE8 has a few features for the transition time between now and when IE7 (and older) usage drops to an insignificant level.  First is Compatibility View.  If the user sees a website that isn’t rendering correctly (for example, my website right now), he can click the “broken page” button in the navigation bar.

Here is the page viewed in Standards Mode.  (I scrolled down to show how the content is pushed down past the sidebar.)

Here is the page viewed in Compatibility View, which is called “quirks mode” behind the scenes.

I would love to know enough about CSS to fix my WordPress theme to render correctly in standards mode, but honestly I have better things to do, and the website renders correctly in Firefox already, so there doesn’t seem to be much point.  Why?  Because I can simply force IE8 to render the website in Compatibility View with a simple tag interested into the page.  What is the tag?

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

When I add that tag to the proper place in the WordPress theme…

The webpage renders correctly, and the compatibility view button goes away.

Note: the version of IE8 used in this post is the one that was bundled with the Windows 7 Beta.