Redesign And Ie

[schussat]

I recently worked on a redesign of my blog, and was very happy with it, until yesterday, when I loaded up the site in IE on my wife's computer at work. The left-hand (main) column doesn't begin until the bottom of the right hand column, and I'm not sure why. To make matters worse, IE still seems to offset background images a little strangely, so the edges of my background graphic don't quite line up across the two columns. Anybody have any potential fixes? I know there are a number of IE-specific rendering issues, but I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with them.

 

Thanks-

[TCH-Bruce]

This is what I see in IE.

[schussat]

Thanks, Bruce! Huh, I wonder if my wife's machine has an older version of IE on it. I'll look into that. In the meantime, I'm happy to think that it may show up properly for most visitors.

 

-Alan

[Virtual Imager]

I see the same thing as Bruce in IE6

[boxturt]

I see the same in IE6 as Bruce and VI but the font appears to be like a New Times and not the arial (or whatever) I see in Bruce's pic. Perhaps you are working on it when I looked

[Virtual Imager]

Uh OH! I just went back to look at the font and now I see what shussat saw on his wife's computer! And it was also not the Arial font. Tried to reload but that didn't help. The text on the left doesn't start till below the text on the right.

 

Shussat, maybe you should just upload a new version of your home page (the other pages seem to work ok) and see if that overwrites this one and solves the problem. I've had to do that once or twice when I couldn't seem to find a reason for my pages not viewing properly.

[Virtual Imager]

Now it's ok again... font and all.

[schussat]

Yowza! I wonder what is happening. The site is dynamically-generated, so there's nothing to re-upload that would make any difference -- especially since it seemed to work for VI the first time. Strange.

 

Boxturt, you're actually seeing the right typeface: I use a serif font for the main column, and Helvetica for the sidebar. I think maybe Bruce forces a sans-serif typeface on his browser.

 

I'm stumped. I tried another machine with IE, and didn't see the original problem, but when I use blockquote, that element is always bumped down below the last line of the right-hand column. IE also isn't displaying the bullets in my li lists, either.

 

Thanks to all of you for your feedback. This is a weird one.

 

-Alan

[Virtual Imager]

Ok Alan... I'm really stumped too. I tried again to see if I could see any bullets. This time all I got was your right hand column (with bullets but not in a frame) and it was all the way on the left side of the page. I immediately dumped that and now I get what I think is the correct page but without bullets.

 

Just fyi: I'm accessing it from the link on your TCH profile page if that matters.

 

I don't know what 'dynamically generated' means, but it doesn't seem all that reliable.

[schussat]

Ok Alan... I'm really stumped too. I tried again to see if I could see any bullets. This time all I got was your right hand column (with bullets but not in a frame) and it was all the way on the left side of the page. I immediately dumped that and now I get what I think is the correct page but without bullets.

Wow... Yeah, I have no idea what's going on there.

 

Just fyi: I'm accessing it from the link on your TCH profile page if that matters.

That's the right link; I don't think it should make a difference.

I don't know what 'dynamically generated' means, but it doesn't seem all that reliable.

You sure seem right about that. What I mean is that that stylesheet, the content, and the page structure are all called by Textpattern from a SQL database. Because I've never had this problem using Firefox, I can't imagine that it's a backend bug. But that said, I'm not aware of any IE-specific issues that would make for this sort of inconsistent rendering.

 

Thanks again.

 

-Alan

[Virtual Imager]

Another fyi: I don't see any bullets with Netscape 7.0 either, but at least the left column is up where it belongs.

 

Here's a thought from someone who knows absolutely nothing about style sheets or CSS: In your html source it says <!-- maincolumn continues here -->

Is it possible that IE interprets that command as it continues from this point on the page and goes down, but on the left? In other words, maybe IE reads that as "move the text to the main column but don't go back up. I have no idea what I'm talking about! Sometimes I'm right just by accident though. All I know is I have a feature on my sight that works in IE, but not in other browsers (disable right click for images only) because they don't interpret the html code the same way. Maybe that's the case here.

 

But if so, why did it work the first time I checked?

[TCH-Bruce]

Yes, I have my browser overriding with Arial font. I see the blockquote problem but can't see why it's doing it. Looks fine in Firefox.

[LisaJill]

While I don't mean to be a standards elitest, this is where validating comes in very very handy.

 

You have a bunch of errors, but of the ones that might be causing the problem is indeed the HTML commentings, check errors 20 and 21

 

#

 

✉

#

 

Line 143, column 11: S separator in comment declaration

 

<!--<!-- beginning linklist div -->-->

 

✉

#

 

Line 143, column 12: invalid comment declaration: found name start character outside comment but inside comment declaration

 

<!--<!-- beginning linklist div -->-->

 

cleaning that up may help a lot, it s hould just be <!-- COMMENT --> =)

 

Maybe others in there causing problems too. Validating is how I "fix" my weird problems which is why I looked there.

 

Hope that helps.

[schussat]

Maybe others in there causing problems too. Validating is how I "fix" my weird problems which is why I looked there.

Validating is a great suggestion, Lisa. I have been meaning to do it, but never got around to it. You may be on to something -- I'll work for a while on validation, and will let you know how it goes.

 

-Alan