The problem (at least in this case) is that IE frequently renders things incorrectly when you're using complex style sheets. This is one of the main reasons that a lot of web sites don't *use* complex style sheets, even though doing so would substantially cut down the size and complexity -- and thus greatly help the maintainability -- of the corresponding HTML. IE gets fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc., right when they're in style sheets, but what it falls down on tends to relate to the "box model" -- essentially, every block on an HTML page, whether it's a paragraph or a list (or a list element) or, usually most importantly, a block the designer has organized with "div" tags, is a box, and CSS specifies standard ways to position them. To make a sidebar on the right side of the page, for instance, should be as simple as putting the sidebar in "div" tags and specifying the block you've created to be a certain width and to "float" to the right, just like an image tag that you've specified is right-aligned.
Alas, positioning is the part where IE most often trips over its shoelaces. What broke in my design from one day to the next was the navigation sidebar. In later iterations, IE decided that it would render the sidebar alone with blank space to its left, then render the content that was supposed to have been to its left in space underneath. I still can't actually figure out what I did that it didn't like, and other browsers seemed to be perfectly happy. The only solution I came up with was to make the page slightly more complex, and it took me a lot of head beating to figure that out.
Even after this, there are still things that IE gets wrong -- the buttons in the sidebar should be flush right with the edge of page header above it, for instance, and I still have no idea where IE is getting the idea that they're slightly indented. Again, every other browser gets it right. Fortunately, that's a minor defect rather than a big honking error.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2004-07-31 10:57 (UTC)Alas, positioning is the part where IE most often trips over its shoelaces. What broke in my design from one day to the next was the navigation sidebar. In later iterations, IE decided that it would render the sidebar alone with blank space to its left, then render the content that was supposed to have been to its left in space underneath. I still can't actually figure out what I did that it didn't like, and other browsers seemed to be perfectly happy. The only solution I came up with was to make the page slightly more complex, and it took me a lot of head beating to figure that out.
Even after this, there are still things that IE gets wrong -- the buttons in the sidebar should be flush right with the edge of page header above it, for instance, and I still have no idea where IE is getting the idea that they're slightly indented. Again, every other browser gets it right. Fortunately, that's a minor defect rather than a big honking error.