Is there a way to avoid IE7 quirks mode when rendering XML + CSS?

Question

I have DocBook documentation developed using CSS xml-stylesheet declaration. It looks great in Firefox, but IE7 doesn't seem to understand the CSS child selectors (like section > title { ... }).

I think this is because IE works in quirks mode to render this XML, and older versions of IE do not support this CSS syntax at all.

The pages I found on the Internet seem to focus on the doctrines of HTML and XHTML and how IE will behave in light of the various permutations of these meanings. I could not find any information about direct XML + CSS. Even worse, it seems that random XML documents always end up in quirks mode, regardless of which files have format directives or style sheets.

Is rendering XML in IE doomed to compatibility with IE5.5? Should I rewrite my CSS?

Answer 1

Could you explain what exactly works? IE7 seems to support child selectors as per the docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250496%28VS.85%29.aspx