title: Why are IE Conditional comments rendered differently when page openned with file:
body: <p>I wrote some conditional comments in my html file and opened it with file://path/test.html. It looked fine. I fired up my app server and pointed my IE 8 browser to <a href="http://myserver.com/ap/test.html" rel="nofollow">http://myserver.com/ap/test.html</a>. the results were different. Can anyone explain why this is happening and what might be done about it?</p>
  
  <p>the source</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;   
  &lt;body&gt;    
  conditional
  &lt;p&gt;
  &lt;!--[if IE 8 ]&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Only IE 8 will see this&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;![endif]--&gt;
  
  &lt;!--[if gt IE 7 ]&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Only gt IE 7 will see this&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;![endif]--&gt;
  
  &lt;!--[if IE]&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;IE sees this.&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;![endif]--&gt;
  
  &lt;!--[if ! IE]&gt;--&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;not IE&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;!--&lt;![endif]--&gt;
  
  &lt;!--[if (gt IE 8)|(!IE)]&gt;&lt;!--&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Every one except IE 8 will see this (gt IE 8)|(!IE)&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;!--&lt;![endif]--&gt;
  
  &lt;p&gt;after conditional
  &lt;/body&gt;   
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>from opening in file with IE 8:</p>
  
  <pre><code>conditional 
  
  Only IE 8 will see this
  
  Only gt IE 7 will see this
  
  IE sees this.
  
  after conditional 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>With same browser in another tab pointing at app server:</p>
  
  <pre><code>conditional 
  
  IE sees this.
  
  after conditional 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My goal is to insert one header on IE 8 browsers and a differetn one on all others. So alternate solutions to that problem would be welcome</p>