Assume Nothing

Note to self: Don’t ever assume that the most popular web browser in the world, with the most amount of funding behind it, can be counted on to be standards-compliant where it counts. According to this page, CSS allows developers to use either 3- or 6-letter hexadecimal values. Some Moveable Type templates use the 3-letter hex values. But IE 5.5 for Windows apparently chokes on those, which is why Mikepop saw the poll table with a black background earlier – rather than ignoring what it didn’t understand, as browsers are supposed to do, IE chose to block out the sun instead.

With that problem “solved,” there remains the revelation that IE 5.5 for Win will shove all the right-hand nav content down to the bottom of the page if even one pixel of extra horizontal matter is present. In other words, if you have two DIVs, 70% and 30% width, and throw in a one-pixel left border on a bounding box somewhere, IE 5.5 / Win will freak out and think the content is too wide for the space, rather than including that pixel in the percentage tally for the overall page width.

Argh.

Music: The Mar-Keys :: Philly Dog

2 Replies to “Assume Nothing”

  1. Erm… I am really sorry for the offtopic, but I think the new face of the weblog has a /TR or a /TD or a colspan missing, because on IE 6 on WinXP the calendar and the right hand side bar in general, does not render on the right hand, but at the end of the whole page, after ALL the tables that hold the logs have been rendered
    (I hope I am making some sense :). Netscape 4 also has the exact same problem.

  2. Hi Eugenia –

    There are no tables in this design – it’s all CSS positioning. See the 2nd paragraph of this post again for the explanation of what causes the problem in Win. I probably can’t debug it till I’m at work with a Win box tomorrow. But short story, it’s the fault of non-compliant CSS handling in IE/Win (even IE/Mac handles it perfectly).

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