CSS and the Eeek! Factor
As I mentioned a few posts back, Kate and I bought a book about CSS. Since then I've read about half of the book, which pretty much covers all of CSS (the rest of the book goes into DOM and JavaScript). With the new knowledge under my belt I've been through my blog template and now for the most part I understand how it works, and I was able to fix a couple of the problems.
I've also been redesigning my web page using the new stuff and the result so far is a vast improvement over the old design. As I was making changes, using the book as a reference, I was able to test what I was doing in Firefox and the new pages are rendering just as the book says they should.
A little while ago I thought I'd upload the pages to the web server on my Linux system and make sure they still came up ok, which they do. So far so good. So I asked Kate to try hitting the same pages on her machine using IE6, which she did...
Eeek! What a damn mess. All the text rendered as great big 24-point bold characters, and that in turn blew away the layout because with such big text it couldn't fit the main content and the sidebar side-by-side so it pushed the sidebar down below the main content. The result was the web-page equivalent of a six-vehicle freeway pile-up.
I went back through the CSS to see what might be wrong, and I was able to fix most of the problems by forcing the text sizes to what they should have been. It's pretty obvious that IE6 doesn't implement CSS quite right.
There are still a couple of problems to fix and I'll do that if I can, but one thing I've always detested about web design is having to kludge a page to fix problems caused by browser incompatibilities.
If anyone knows of a web page with workarounds to get IE6 to render right, I'd appreciate hearing about it. In the meantime I'll see if I can fix the last few problems but if I can't do that in a reasonable time I'll probably end up having to add a footnote to all my pages saying something like, "best viewed with something that isn't Internet Explorer".
I've also been redesigning my web page using the new stuff and the result so far is a vast improvement over the old design. As I was making changes, using the book as a reference, I was able to test what I was doing in Firefox and the new pages are rendering just as the book says they should.
A little while ago I thought I'd upload the pages to the web server on my Linux system and make sure they still came up ok, which they do. So far so good. So I asked Kate to try hitting the same pages on her machine using IE6, which she did...
Eeek! What a damn mess. All the text rendered as great big 24-point bold characters, and that in turn blew away the layout because with such big text it couldn't fit the main content and the sidebar side-by-side so it pushed the sidebar down below the main content. The result was the web-page equivalent of a six-vehicle freeway pile-up.
I went back through the CSS to see what might be wrong, and I was able to fix most of the problems by forcing the text sizes to what they should have been. It's pretty obvious that IE6 doesn't implement CSS quite right.
There are still a couple of problems to fix and I'll do that if I can, but one thing I've always detested about web design is having to kludge a page to fix problems caused by browser incompatibilities.
If anyone knows of a web page with workarounds to get IE6 to render right, I'd appreciate hearing about it. In the meantime I'll see if I can fix the last few problems but if I can't do that in a reasonable time I'll probably end up having to add a footnote to all my pages saying something like, "best viewed with something that isn't Internet Explorer".
Labels: Computers
posted by Pete Ford at
1:52 AM
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