How do I force Internet Explorer to render in Standards Mode and NOT in Quirks?

I am coding a Frontend which works well in IE7 Standards Mode and IE8 Standards Mode.

When I start up Internet Explorer and load the page both IE7 and IE8 go to Quirks Mode directly. How can I force both IE7 and IE8 to always load the page in Standards Mode?

I have no special meta tags added so far.

Thanks for helping me out

Edit: My doctype and head looks as follows at the moment:

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html lang="de"> 
<head> 
    <title>...</title> 
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <script src="js/html5.js"></script> 

    (...)
</head>

Solution 1:

This is the way to be absolutely certain :

<!doctype html> <!-- html5 -->
<html lang="en"> <!-- lang="xx" is allowed, but NO xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", lang:xml="", and so on -->
<head>
<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=Edge"/> 
<!-- as the **very** first line just after head-->
..
</head>

Reason :
Whenever IE meets anything that conflicts, it turns back to "IE 7 standards mode", ignoring the x-ua-compatible.

(I know this is an answer to a very old question, but I have struggled with this myself, and above scheme is the correct answer. It works all the way, everytime)

Solution 2:

Sadly, they want us to use a tag to let their browser know what to do. Look at this documentation, it tell us to use:

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

and it should do.

Solution 3:

  1. Using html5 doctype at the beginning of the page.

    <!DOCTYPE html>

  2. Force IE to use the latest render mode

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

  3. If your target browser is ie8, then check your compatible settings in IE8

I blog this in details