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Diggory Laycock · Mar 1, 2004, 07:23 AM

Can MS IE (windows) render a background to a <div> that has a fixed background?

NO.

See the canonical example: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edg...al/glassy.html

<sarcasm>I love the way MS has a large negative effect on my working life - even though I avoid them like the plague.</sarcasm>

Will they ever fix bugs like these? Hasn't IE development "finished"?

Chris O'Brien · Mar 1, 2004, 10:31 AM

You can kind of get the same effect using CSS expressions in MSIE/Win...

Since background:fixed is supposed to fix it with respect to the top left of the document, you can use an expression to find the offset dimensions of your element and position the background that way.

Fscking annoying though, nonetheless!

DVD Plaza · Mar 1, 2004, 05:36 PM

Another day - another MSIE (PC) CSS bug

Only one? My time is severely wasted stumbling across several bugs/lack of support/bastardised support a day with that utter piece of...

DUNSEL · Mar 1, 2004, 06:01 PM

Well what they were trying to do could've been accomplished even easier than what they did. Just make the bg a single pic, and reduce the opacity of the div. You'd have seen the bg through it, and it would've stayed put.

redJag · Mar 1, 2004, 06:18 PM

Yeah, but then there would be no glassy effect.

clam2000 · Mar 1, 2004, 06:44 PM

ie in general has trouble with fixed divs, it's best to try to not use them at all, or at least make a second version which doesn't rely on them.

--will

DUNSEL · Mar 1, 2004, 07:34 PM

Sure they could've. The glassy effect is part of the image. It still could be, without the shell as part of it. Then make it semi-transparent, and bingo.

Chris O'Brien · Mar 2, 2004, 02:57 AM

I think whether it could be achieved in MSIE by doing it some other way or not isn't really the issue. The whole effect is done using purely CSS 1.0 - and IE/Win can't even handle that, which is a source of frustration for a helluva lot of us.

And you wouldn't get the glassy effect to work properly by doing what you suggested dunsel - if you notice what happens when you load the page - you can see the top of the original spirally thing (sans glassy effect), and it's only once you scroll down that the top of it joins in the glassy effect... the same is true when you scroll right to the bottom.

Millennium · Mar 2, 2004, 08:42 AM

The problem is that IE has a very different interpretation of fixed backgrounds. According to the standards, a fixed background should not move as the div moves (so a moving div will show a different part of the background), and it should not scroll as the div scrolls.

IE, on the other hand, does things differently: a fixed background doesn't scroll as the div scrolls (like the standard), but unlike the standard it moves as the div moves. It's an interesting effect in its own right, but it is the wrong effect.

Diggory Laycock · Mar 2, 2004, 10:02 AM

Originally posted by Millennium:
The problem is that IE has a very different interpretation of fixed backgrounds. According to the standards, a fixed background should not move as the div moves (so a moving div will show a different part of the background), and it should not scroll as the div scrolls.

IE, on the other hand, does things differently: a fixed background doesn't scroll as the div scrolls (like the standard), but unlike the standard it moves as the div moves. It's an interesting effect in its own right, but it is the wrong effect.

Exactly - it's meant to be fixed to the viewport.

bojangles · Mar 3, 2004, 05:17 AM

Slightly off topic, but I love M$-bashing�.

My biggest problem with IE is that neither the Mac OS nor the Windows version is fully compliant, but they�re not even similar to each other. I could understand if they wanted to make a stupid, proprietary browser that doesn�t work with the rest of the world (that�s what Microsoft is all about), but why make two?

(Yes, I know all about the MacBU. It�s a joke, son. A joke.)

Millennium · Mar 4, 2004, 10:57 AM

Originally posted by bojangles:
Slightly off topic, but I love M$-bashing�.

My biggest problem with IE is that neither the Mac OS nor the Windows version is fully compliant, but they�re not even similar to each other. I could understand if they wanted to make a stupid, proprietary browser that doesn�t work with the rest of the world (that�s what Microsoft is all about), but why make two?

(Yes, I know all about the MacBU. It�s a joke, son. A joke.)

For its time, Tasman (the engine in IE5/Mac) was the most standards-compliant browser in existence. It even beat Mozilla at the time (though Mozilla would, in time, come to eclipse it). However, Microsoft didn't bother with doing much with it after that, and so it fell behind.

Until MSN/OSX, that is. MSN/OSX is based off of a very heavily-updated Tasman engine, which includes support for some things that Mozilla can't even touch at the moment (including the nth-child() and nth-of-type() selectors). Unfortunately, since MSN requires payment up front, most developers don't have any clue about this, and even if they knew they wouldn't care to test. But MSN/OSX is very much a dark horse; standards-wise it blows everything away.

Why am I mentioning all of this? It's well-known that Tasman was originally created to be easily portable across platforms. I'm wondering if MSN/OSX isn't meant to be a testbed for furthering the work on Tasman, ending with a port of it to Windows for Longhorn's built-in browser. It would be a major coup for MS -standards-compliance to silence the other browser makers, while of course pushing their own proprietary crap- and the hell of it is that no one is going to even see it coming.

Chris O'Brien · Mar 4, 2004, 04:30 PM

Millenium, you must read some of the same blogs that I do - I've read a comment on a blog somewhere that is almost exactly the same as your post. I just need to find a link.....

Anyway, it is a very good post nonetheless!

DVD Plaza · Mar 5, 2004, 01:13 AM

Originally posted by Millennium:
MSN/OSX is based off of a very heavily-updated Tasman engine... since MSN requires payment up front, most developers don't have any clue about this... standards-wise it blows everything away... I'm wondering if MSN/OSX isn't meant to be a testbed for furthering the work on Tasman, ending with a port of it to Windows for Longhorn's built-in browser.

Where could one accidentally obtain a copy of the MSN OSX browser? I wouldn't mind adding it to the many browsers I thoroughly test every aspect of my new 100% XHTML & CSS site with.

Millennium · Mar 5, 2004, 04:57 AM

Originally posted by DVD Plaza:
Where could one accidentally obtain a copy of the MSN OSX browser? I wouldn't mind adding it to the many browsers I thoroughly test every aspect of my new 100% XHTML & CSS site with.

Oh, downloading it is easy enough; you can get that straight from Microsoft. What you need is an MSN password; without that, you won't be able to launch the browser. I can't help you as far as that goes.

OreoCookie · Mar 7, 2004, 12:40 PM

Originally posted by Black Book:
Millenium, you must read some of the same blogs that I do - I've read a comment on a blog somewhere that is almost exactly the same as your post. I just need to find a link.....

Anyway, it is a very good post nonetheless!

Well, but for two reasons it's pretty much a moot question: 1. Most of the people I know have windows computers, and almost all of them use IE as their standard browser. 2. Even on OS X, that doesn't help a lot. Here, Safari or some Mozilla derivative (Camino, Mozilla, Firebird, I mean Firefox

). While they are not perfect (Camino has some redraw problems with my CSS design), they handle things much better. The layout is identical in both which leads me to the conclusion that IE messes up.

Personally, I have the choice of discarding my CSS version (because I don't like fiddling with code that's the way it's supposed to be) or just tell the people to use a Gecko or KHTML based browser.