IE7 Web Developers Nightmare

January 7, 2007 | Leave a Comment

IT Gears has an interesting article on IE7 incompatibilities.

Looks like the author ran into a few more of the incompatiblities that I have, although I was very displeased at the look of some of my web sites when I first saw them under IE7.

My earlier IE7 articles talk about some of those bugs (like the one with the center tag).

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Visitor Experience 

I Hate IE7!

November 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment

For an “improved web browser,” Internet Explorer 7 has much in common with a stubborn mule. No matter what you want to do, it doesn’t want to do it right now.

If you happened to visit my Terry’s Computer Tips web site late this afternoon, you might have seen what I mean…

I made some tweaks to the site and was very happy with the results in Firefox. Then, I checked the pages in Opera. Again, it was great.

But, then I looked at it with IE7 — and found a mess.

Whether it was the absolute positioning changes that I was making, or perhaps a missing or extra <div> tag, or a glitch in the JavaScript, IE7 threw away almost all the content on the page and then laid out the rest of the page in a mess. Yet, Opera and Firefox displayed the pages perfectly.

I couldn’t revert to the earlier version fast enough to suit me — but I got there.

Gee, and I thought the strangenesses of IE6 were bad — at least it would usually display the contents in almost the right location.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, JavaScript, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience 

IE7 Bug: Bulleted Lists

November 13, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I wrote the other day about the IE7 Center tag bug. IE6, Firefox 1.5.0.7, Firefox 2.0, and Opera all displayed the pages exactly the same. And, then IE7 came along…

Bulleted lists were the first thing that I found that IE7 displayed differently from IE6, Firefox and Opera.

IE7’s default indent for bulleted lists appears to be about 60 pixels, where the others defaulted to about 8 pixels.

Where did I see the problem? In one of my WordPress blogs, where I used bulleted lists for some of the entries I had added to the sidebar.

All of a sudden, the bullets moved from the left side of the DIV, all the way to the middle of the 140 pixel wide sidebar.

After experimentation, I finally solved the problem by defining the margin-left and padding-left on both the UL and LI tags. Interestingly, I also had to define the list-style-type for the UL tag.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera 

IE7 Web Design Issue: Centering

November 11, 2006 | 2 Comments

I’ve run into two problems that were fine in IE6, in Firefox and Opera, but that display poorly in IE7.

First, the <center> tag.

Yes, it has been deprecated for a while in favor of a <div align=”center”>. And, then, current recommendations call for creating a enclosing <div>and applying margin:auto or margin-right:auto; margin-left:auto.

But, this gets rather hairy very quickly.

With IE6, the easiest way to center a page was to use a <center /> tags. Firefox and Opera went along quietly and all was well, until IE7 came along.

Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t like <center> tags, at least with the combinations of DIVs I was using on my www.TerrysComputerTips.com site.

Although my pages are fixed now (by removing the <center> and </center> tags), IE7 initially took this same beautifully centered page — and right-aligned the DIV at a page width of about 1400 pixels.

Where it got that number, I don’t know. Idenfifying the problem was easy.

Identifying the solution wasn’t — who would have thought that removing the <center> and </center> tags would make the page center properly?

I’m not sure how I found it, other than shooting at the problem with a “what affects the whole page…that I can change” approach. But, that was it.

It’s time to lose the <center> tag.


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Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under CSS, Firefox, HTML, IE7, Opera, Usability, Visitor Experience