Helping IE6 limp along

Amazingly enough, apparently there was still one IE6 user who didn’t yet know that to get around the bug in IE’s handling of the CSS that most Movable Type templates use, you just have to hit F11 twice, since someone told Charles Miller that his page wasn’t working.

At the moment I can’t offer a cure, since* the solution to that bug that I thought I was using, adding an XML declaration (which bizarrely enough puts IE6 in quirks mode), seems not to be working anymore. That would be bad enough, but since mousing over a nice title that’s down below the sidebar, after you’ve F11ed the bug out of the way, reinstates the bug and jerks you up to the bottom of the sidebar, making links in any posts down there completely useless, I really need to find some other solution. After all, IE6 is only a year and a half old now, and it has only partly broken support for five year old technology, so it’s still too early to abandon support for it completely. Isn’t it?

* I can’t offer a cure, but within minutes RKB could, and did: a simple height: 100%; in the #links definition, and IE6 is stylin’ without the sickening lurch up to the bottom of the sidebar when you mouseover a link. Thanks!

(While you are over there, take a look at his “How to Improve Comment Visibility” howto (well, at the feature itself, really), in case I decide that we’re a democracy around here, and ask for opinions before I throw it into the mix. I’m a bit concerned about how you lot are all so fond of your full names (and I suppose I run to more letters than any of you) – it looks pretty damn slick with just first names and initials, but I suspect that twenty or thirty first-and-lasts would make a big block that your eyes would just skip right over.)

3 Comments

Comment by RKB #
2003-02-21 22:02:43

Phil, the following addition to my stylesheet seems to have helped solve the problem for me. While I can’t attest to complete cross-platform compatibility, my sidebar is pretty short, and I haven’t heard any complaints from anybody that they can’t see the rest of my content.

I simply added height:100% to the links style in my stylesheet. Seems to keep the content div from cutting off at the end of my links div.

Hope this helps. F11 twice sucks.

– Robert

 
Comment by Jeff #
2003-02-21 22:34:08

It’s a crappy solution and those into the whole content v. presentation thing big time will balk, but simply including a pixel image (and you can even have the src be empty) at the end of each column that’s affected seems to avoid all instances of the cutoff bug.

Yes, it’s 1996 and we’re still using spacers :( But then I don’t see what’s so bad about it given it’s a small change in a CMS’s templates, and can be undone easily at a later time.

 
Comment by Geodog #
2003-02-22 03:38:40

The trick I read about on the MT support forum, from Kadyellebee I think, was to put

<div style="clear:both"> </div>

right before the closing body tag. That worked for me, although it was total voodoo.

I really liked Robert’s comment mod, and it will work fine for you, at least until stavrosthewonderchicken shows up.

 
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