Fixing the IE6 scrolling bug
Since it looks like Blogger’s introducing a whole new audience to the IE6 CSS bug that cuts off the page at the bottom of the sidebar, rather than at the bottom of the longest column, I figured it was time to look for a page I could refer people to, rather than try to explain it and the possible solutions, again and again.
Whether it’s just a matter of linguistic convergence, since I searched for things like “IE6 CSS scrolling bug fix” that I’m used to reading in friends’ blogs, or because we really are the only people triggering it and talking about how to fix it, I was quite pleased to see that I either know or at least know of what seems like almost everyone who has talked about it, and the best single page I could find for the IE6 CSS scrolling bug fix was in the css-discuss Wiki hosted by Simon Willison, featuring solutions mostly by michael paige. Other people may be annoyed by finding too many blogs in their search results, but I’m thrilled, and proud, and generally quite satisfied with what they have to say, or where they point me.
yeah… this bug really bugs.
Well… it fixed up on my page simply by posting the first line ie:
may be…. its not a good solution?
I did use that fix for a while, since it amuses me so much: putting a perfectly legal XML declaration in an otherwise-perfect XHTML page puts IE6 in quirks mode (how can you not love that?), and as long as your CSS can deal with the box-model results of being in quirks mode, it seemed to work fine. Then I did some CSS and HTML cleanup, and suddenly it stopped working, for some reason I was too lazy to figure out (I made dozens of changes, and nobody mentioned the return of the scrolling bug for several weeks afterward). So I’d say if it works for you, and you’re using IE yourself at least often enough to notice if it stops working, then it’s fine, as long as you don’t have a reason to want IE6’s standards mode. Mozilla is supposed to parse much faster in standards mode than in quirks mode, but I don’t know about IE.