IE 6 is the odd man out?

ta0kira · 02-24-2006, 04:00 PM

I've been battling with Internet Explorer for weeks trying to get my homepage to show up "correctly". For some reason it chooses to ignore certain things which other browsers do not, such as "min-width", and is inconsistent with how it interprets "width" in the first place. The biggest problem is centering portions of the page when the window is smaller than the minimum width allowed. My page shows up how I want it to (I'm really not asking that much...) on Konqueror, Mozilla, Netscape, and whichever IE came with Windows ME years ago. As of now I've decided that I am going to not bother with trying to please IE anymore since my site is mostly intended for Linux users.

Is there some trick to writing HTML for IE which differs from "real" HTML? Is it even worth the effort of trying to get it to work? Here is my site, in case you'd like to see what I am talking about. Thanks.
ta0kira

satinet · 02-24-2006, 04:02 PM

you've just discovered that IE isnt standards compliant. that's why some sights look wierd in firefox - coz IE code has to be written differently to and recognised standard.

welcome to planet MS. just look at all the RFC docs they publish tho....

AdaHacker · 02-24-2006, 04:16 PM

Well, it might help if you were actually using "real" HTML. The code on that page is a big mess that doesn't even come close to being valid. Frankly, I'm a little surprised it renders correctly in any browser. It's true that IE has lots of rendering bugs, but you don't have any business complaining about those until your code validates cleanly, which your page doesn't.

jlliagre · 02-24-2006, 04:22 PM

By the way, IE 7 will include Mozilla (Firefox) Gecko rendering engine.

satinet · 02-24-2006, 04:29 PM

surely not, how can that be legal under the GPL?

dmail · 02-24-2006, 04:40 PM

No offense meant ta0kira but the colours and layout used are awful. By the way Im using firefox.

AdaHacker · 02-24-2006, 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by satinet

surely not, how can that be legal under the GPL?

Firefox is licensed under the MPL (Mozilla Public License), not the GPL. Not that it matter anyway, since it's not true.

thekid · 02-24-2006, 05:05 PM

IE was written with Frontpage specifically in mind for webpage design, and Frontpage is horribly out of compliance with standards, hence IE is out of compliance.

jlliagre · 02-25-2006, 02:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdaHacker

Firefox is licensed under the MPL (Mozilla Public License), not the GPL. Not that it matter anyway, since it's not true.

You're right, it's not true.

I was fooled by someone I usually trust who relayed that fake news to me. I naively believe it after an uncareful web search found medias relaying it ... sorry about that.

That said, Mozilla is indeed released under a non GPL License, if not Netscape wouldn't be allowed to release a non opensource browser derived from it.

Technically, MS is also allowed to integrate some or all of Mozilla code in its browser. That would be a interesting move ...

ta0kira · 02-25-2006, 05:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdaHacker

It's true that IE has lots of rendering bugs, but you don't have any business complaining about those until your code validates cleanly, which your page doesn't.

That's enlightening. I'm used to C++ compilers telling me that I have errors; I assumed that since nothing told me I had errors (and that something actually showed up, and it looked right on something) that I was good to go.

As far as the errors, however, 99% are from  , which is what Quanta uses. Then there are some errors which are in the frame added by GeoCities. In all, there are about 5 things that I legitimately did wrong, but hardly enough for the entire document to be considered invalid.

By the way, a lot of that garbage wasn't in there originally; I added it because that is what it took for IE to show what I wanted.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dmail

No offense meant ta0kira but the colours and layout used are awful. By the way Im using firefox.

Yes, it does come out looking pretty bad on a few computers I've used. The colors actually work out quite nicely on several computers, however (those with accurate color display, without the hazing that older/cheaper monitors provide.) I'm downloading Firefox to see what it looks like (someone I know looked at it on Firefox on Windows and said it came out right.)
ta0kira

paulsm4 · 02-25-2006, 05:59 PM

I'm afraid I have to agree with AdaHacker and dmail. Here are a few representative snippets from your web site:

Code:

<script language="JavaScript">var PUpage="76001067"; ...
thCs="e87e99e1915e1181fac7314bea5760a5";</script><noscript><link rel="stylesheet" href="http://themis.geocities.yahoo.com/jsoff.css?thIP=69.111.72.132&thTs=1140911400"></noscript><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.geocities.com/js_source/geovck07.js"></script>
<!-- text above generated by server. PLEASE REMOVE -->
<!--General page settings i.e. background, general style-->
<body style="background-image:url(img_1107.jpg); background-position:center center; color:#d08555; font-family:serif; min-width:755; font-size:medium; margin:0;">
<!-- following code added by server. PLEASE REMOVE -->
<link href="http://us.geocities.com/js_source/div.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.geocities.com/js_source/div03.js"></script>
<!-- preceding code added by server. PLEASE REMOVE -->

<!--This is separated from the body section so that the right margin still shows-->
<div style="border-color:#158590; border-style:outset; margin:15;">

<!--Title bar-->

<title>Projects by Kevin P. Barry</title>
...
<hr align="center" style="border-color:#d08555; border-style:outset; width:700;">

<!--END Footer/copyright/etc.-->

</body>

</div>
<!-- text below generated by server. PLEASE REMOVE --></object></layer></div></span></style></noscript></table></script></applet><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mc/mc.js"></script><script 
...
src="http://visit.webhosting.yahoo.com/visit.gif?us1140911400" alt="setstats" border="0" width="1" height="1"></noscript>
<IMG SRC="http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=76001067&t=1140911400&f=us-w63" ALT=1 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>

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AdaHacker · 02-25-2006, 09:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ta0kira

As far as the errors, however, 99% are from  , which is what Quanta uses.

Actually, you're wrong - those nbsp errors are red-herrings. It's just like with C compilers - the errors above confused the parser and it started spitting out bogus error messages. That happens when you omit the DOCTYPE, the outer <html> tag, the entire <head> section, and put the <title> tag in the body section. If you fix those, the nbsp errors will go away.

Quote:

In all, there are about 5 things that I legitimately did wrong, but hardly enough for the entire document to be considered invalid.

You left out some of the key structural elements of the document. How is that not enough to invalidate it? At any rate, browsers have historically been unreasonably tolerant of garbage markup, but if your code isn't valid, you shouldn't count on the browser getting it right. IE definitely has its problems with adhering to web standards, but you can't complain about that if you're not adhering to them either.

xhi · 02-25-2006, 09:55 PM

as was said ie does not support the standards.. so to make it look good you will have to put in ugly hacks.. i usually offer a stripped down alternative page for ie users.. just make a stylesheet for ie users to load if the main one does not render correctly..

here is an interesting bit from a guy who did an excellent comparision on standard suporting browsers and ie..
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/wrongWithIE/