SharePoint, DOCTYPE, and Master Pages

SharePoint by default does not support taking IE out of quirks mode.  This is discussed in a great blog entry by Heather Solomon.  Not enforcing a dtd through the DOCTYPE element in the default.master (for example
DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd")

Caused me a lot of problems since Height 100% is not honored.  Specifically the Reporting Services Add-in for Sharepoint is reliant on the height=100% property of tables.  It was necessary for me to include the doctype then.  This created some other issues in that it broke some of the other scripts in sharepoint.  This is because when ie is in quirks mode document.body is the root document element but when the DOCTYPE is applied, document.documentElement becomes the root element.  Alot of these discoveries can be made using script debugging in IE

Here's a sample of a script i had to change in IE55UP.js....

function MSOLayout_GetRealOffset(StartingObject,OffsetType, EndParent)
{
 var realValue=0;
 if(!EndParent) EndParent=document.documentElement;
 if(EndParent==null){
     EndParent = document.body;
 }
 for (var currentObject=StartingObject; currentObject !=EndParent && currentObject !=document.documentElement && currentObject !=document.body; currentObject=currentObject.offsetParent)
 {
  realValue+=eval('currentObject.offset'+OffsetType)
 }
 return realValue;
}