[mdcarter1]

So I'm playing around with CSS on my web site -- www.bytecloud.com -- and of course it renders fine in every browser except MSIE!!! Can anybody recommend any resources that may give some tips on the idiosyncrasies of MSIE's CSS issues? This is driving me nuts.

[dillerX]

Have you tried this?

philz showed me that one day. changed my life

[philzilla]

or, you could give Simon's hack a whirl?

[dillerX]

Originally posted by philzilla:
or, you could give Simon's hack a whirl?

i love u.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by mdcarter1:
So I'm playing around with CSS on my web site -- www.bytecloud.com -- and of course it renders fine in every browser except MSIE!!! Can anybody recommend any resources that may give some tips on the idiosyncrasies of MSIE's CSS issues? This is driving me nuts.

Well luckily it displays pretty well in MSIE for the most part I'm not sure which IE you're referring to, IE 6 or 5 but IE 6 should conform to the box model so it shouldn't be that. Instead of going through and messing around with it and trying to fit a solution into your current design... I'll suggest any alternate layout choice that should be a bit more stable with browsers.

Currently you're setting two explicit widths for the sidebar and the content respectively. Then floating the sidebar to the left, and the content to the right. Instead what I would do is keep the sidebar with an explicit width (perhaps with ems instead of pixels) and continue to float it to the left. Give it a "margin-left: 20" like you have now. The right padding won't be needed. (Do you also need a bottom padding? The sidebar doesn't have any borders or anything so I don't see why that would be needed.) Now with the content id remove all of the properties (Is there a reason that you in the body selector you have all the text horizontally centered?). You'll notice that the content seems to fit into place... but it touches the sidebar. So then you give it a left margin of the width of the sidebar plus the space in between. So if the sidebar is 200px, and you want 20px between the sidebar and content, then for the content, you can put "margin-left: 220px".

Doing this gives you the benefit of not having to set any explicit width for your content div. It also means that you won't have to use any padding, which can mess with browsers like MSIE 5. You shouldn't have to worry about using the box model hack either. FWIW I also checked to make sure it works in IE 6 and it does.

HTH

P.S. One thing I noticed is that you seem to redeclare your fonts several times through your css file... you should only have to do it once, and then later on you can adjust the font-size or style. I also noticed that you seem sometimes you have Lucida Grande and sometimes you don't. Like when you hover it becomes Lucida Grande or certain blocks use it... This seems to make the layout shift sometimes.

[mdcarter1]

Thanks Synotic, I really appreciate your looking at that for me. I will give it a shot tonight and let you know how it goes.

As for the padding on the bottom of the sidebar, I can't remember exactly why i did that. I think it might have been because for some reason I couldn't get some space between it and the footer when the content was very small.

[DUNSEL]

It looks fine to me in IE6. I have a lot more problems with NS, especially 7.1, than I ever have with IE. I noticed IE 5.5 for some reason didn't recognize the CSS background-color property, but that's about it. NS 7.1 is giving me fits, and I know there's nothing wrong with my code because it displays beautifully in ever other browser, including earlier NS builds.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by DUNSEL:
It looks fine to me in IE6. I have a lot more problems with NS, especially 7.1, than I ever have with IE. I noticed IE 5.5 for some reason didn't recognize the CSS background-color property, but that's about it. NS 7.1 is giving me fits, and I know there's nothing wrong with my code because it displays beautifully in ever other browser, including earlier NS builds.

Well it probably looks fine because it looks like he incorporated some of my suggestions Earlier, the content would begin below the sidebar.

As for your own problems... it's kind of hard to understand whether your referring to mdcarter's site or your own because you kind of mix them up in there. Are you saving that IE 5.5 doesn't respect the background color on his site or that you've observed doesn't that it doesn't respect background-color in general? If the latter I'm fairly certain that it does support background-color. If it doesn't work with mdcarter's, that's a different (and interesting) issue. It depends on whether or not he wants to support IE 5.5.

I find it kind of interesting that you have more problems with NS (I assume your referring to specifically the newer generation not the 4.0 and below era) than with MSIE. One thing that might cause this is that you're using IE and writing with its bugs and Netscape is simply correctly working with the site, but to you, the result is unexpected. What is "every other browser"? Does this include Mozilla browsers? If I'm not mistaken NS 7 is based on Mozilla so it should display fairly similarly to other browsers in the Mozilla family. If not then there may be a specific bug(s) in Netscape 7.1 that may be causing you problems. I personally just test in Firefox/Mozilla with the assumption that it will display similarly in all Mozilla browsers. I still wouldn't discount your code from being the problem. Depending on which browsers you're testing in (would be useful to know), you may be working with a set of bugs that make it seem to display correctly. If you have any links or more questions then be sure to make a thread.

I hope this was all somewhat helpful

[Chris O'Brien]

Originally posted by Synotic:
If I'm not mistaken NS 7 is based on Mozilla so it should display fairly similarly to other browsers in the Mozilla family.

Yeah, Netscape 7.1 is Mozilla 1.4 (with some minor UI differences) AFAIK

[mdcarter1]

Originally posted by Synotic:
I hope this was all somewhat helpful

Indeed it was. I incorporated your comments and it has fixed the issues is MSIE 6. I dont know about 5.5, I dont have that available to me. Thanks again.

[DUNSEL]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Well it probably looks fine because it looks like he incorporated some of my suggestions Earlier, the content would begin below the sidebar.

As for your own problems... it's kind of hard to understand whether your referring to mdcarter's site or your own because you kind of mix them up in there. Are you saving that IE 5.5 doesn't respect the background color on his site or that you've observed doesn't that it doesn't respect background-color in general? If the latter I'm fairly certain that it does support background-color. If it doesn't work with mdcarter's, that's a different (and interesting) issue. It depends on whether or not he wants to support IE 5.5.

I find it kind of interesting that you have more problems with NS (I assume your referring to specifically the newer generation not the 4.0 and below era) than with MSIE. One thing that might cause this is that you're using IE and writing with its bugs and Netscape is simply correctly working with the site, but to you, the result is unexpected. What is "every other browser"? Does this include Mozilla browsers? If I'm not mistaken NS 7 is based on Mozilla so it should display fairly similarly to other browsers in the Mozilla family. If not then there may be a specific bug(s) in Netscape 7.1 that may be causing you problems. I personally just test in Firefox/Mozilla with the assumption that it will display similarly in all Mozilla browsers. I still wouldn't discount your code from being the problem. Depending on which browsers you're testing in (would be useful to know), you may be working with a set of bugs that make it seem to display correctly. If you have any links or more questions then be sure to make a thread.

I hope this was all somewhat helpful

Specifically I'm referring to NS 7.1. When a page displays properly in IE, Safari 1.2, Mozilla, and NS 6.2, yet not in 7.1, I make the assumption it's NS 7.1 that's at fault.

The background color issue might've been with IE5, and corrected in 5.5, I really don't recall. All I know is since encountering that problem in a customer's page, I include the BG color declaration in the body tag as well, to be on the safe side.