My day...

[mudskipper]

Thanks Nick - that looks really useful. I love the ff developer toolbar - didn't know IE had such a thing! Help much appreciated.

[NickFitz]

Indeed. I did tell 'em up front I don't do design stuff. No worries, they said, they'll supply the designs. I was confidently expecting HTML but got a PDF. Ah well, they seem happy enough with my botch job. Mind you, they haven't looked at it in IE6 yet...!

zoom: 1; is your friend

Install the IE Developer Toolbar. Using its DOM/CSS views, identify containing elements that are leaking their contents (or possibly throwing them to the four corners of the screen) and see if, in the CSS column, they show a property called hasLayout with the value -1. If they don't then, using the attributes inspector, set zoom to 1 and they'll almost certainly start behaving again.

Once you've identified all the elements that need it, just add that zoom into the appropriate CSS declarations: it won't affect anything else, although if you want you can go to town and put it in an IE-only stylesheet included via conditional comments.

Oh, if you have anything floated that has left or right margins, also set display to inline:

#foo {
    float: left;
    margin: 3px 6px;
    display: inline;
}

as that fixes the doubled-margins bug.

[d000hg]

In that case, consider my sarcasm retracted

[mudskipper]

And they're paying you how many £100s a day as an experienced expert? .

Indeed. I did tell 'em up front I don't do design stuff. No worries, they said, they'll supply the designs. I was confidently expecting HTML but got a PDF. Ah well, they seem happy enough with my botch job. Mind you, they haven't looked at it in IE6 yet...!

[wingnut]

top man

thanks.

doesn't help out matey boy admittedly but I can't really help.

Perhaps a curry on top of all those beers would help?

[EternalOptimist]

could be worse. Imagine trying to repair a server that was allegedly backed up and has multiple disk failures, for a friends company, in the full knowledge that if you fail they are stuffed.
With them politely loitering, trying to refrain from only ask questions every five minutes to every 10.



Got it sorted though

top man

[d000hg]

I can't do this css layout bollx. Give me a <table> any day.

And they're paying you how many £100s a day as an experienced expert? .

[wingnut]

Go and have a beer. Relax and don't think about it till tomorrow.

could be worse. Imagine trying to repair a server that was allegedly backed up and has multiple disk failures, for a friends company, in the full knowledge that if you fail they are stuffed.
With them politely loitering, trying to refrain from only ask questions every five minutes to every 10.



Got it sorted though

[norrahe]

Thanks. I feel so much better for knowing that!

Go and have a beer. Relax and don't think about it till tomorrow.

[mudskipper]

You need to remember that the XML empty element shorthand syntax <foo /> can only be used in XHTML (served as text/html) for elements that are defined by the (X)HTML DTD as having an empty content model.

As IE's parser doesn't know anything about XHTML (it's HTML-only) it sees the trailing slash within the start tag as the declaration of an attribute; as "/" isn't a valid name for an attribute, it then discards it as an ignorable syntax error, sees the ">" as the end of the start tag, and treats subsequent content as the contents of the <script> tag.

The only reason it doesn't similarly fail for constructs like <br /> and <img /> is that they are defined in the DTD as having an empty content model, and therefore it doesn't expect to find an end tag for them.

In fact, the <script /> construct should also fail on other browsers when the same content is served to them with Content-Type "text/html" instead of "application/xhtml+xml", for the same reasons.

Thanks. I feel so much better for knowing that!

[NickFitz]

How many hours did I waste because I forgot IE doesn't like a self closing <script/> tag?

You need to remember that the XML empty element shorthand syntax <foo /> can only be used in XHTML (served as text/html) for elements that are defined by the (X)HTML DTD as having an empty content model.

As IE's parser doesn't know anything about XHTML (it's HTML-only) it sees the trailing slash within the start tag as the declaration of an attribute; as "/" isn't a valid name for an attribute, it then discards it as an ignorable syntax error, sees the ">" as the end of the start tag, and treats subsequent content as the contents of the <script> tag.

The only reason it doesn't similarly fail for constructs like <br /> and <img /> is that they are defined in the DTD as having an empty content model, and therefore it doesn't expect to find an end tag for them.

In fact, the <script /> construct should also fail on other browsers when the same content is served to them with Content-Type "text/html" instead of "application/xhtml+xml", for the same reasons.

[Zippy]

Tsk, tsk you heretic.

Enjoy the beer!

[mudskipper]

Linky

This about sums it up.

I can't do this css layout bollx. Give me a <table> any day. How many hours did I waste because I forgot IE doesn't like a self closing <script/> tag? Add onto that the hours spent finding the hardcoded positioning in a bit of javascript...

Thankfully I have a fridge full of beer.