Mac IE 5 issues

[Ken Walden]

Hello all,

I have a crudely put together web site I've fashioned for our business,
which is now displaying fine on all the browsers I've been able to try,
except for IE 5 on Mac. And it's totally dead on there.

The URL is http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/

If you have access to IE 5 on a Mac, and can look at it, and have any
guess as to why it looks like this, I would love to hear it. What I see
when I look is that the the whole page spans off of the right edge of
the screen (even though it's supposed to only have a width of 800) and
worse, there's no horizontal scrollbar. It appears that none of the
text in the main column is wrapping, the third column isn't even
visible.

The site is a rather crude combination of CSS and tables that I hacked
together as I was learning how to deal with CSS. So I imagine that
something in there has bogeyed it all up. I have searched the web high
and low and seen no mention of anything similar. I know have found some
ways that I could probably better design it without tables, but at this
point I'd rather just get it up, especially since it works in all the
other browsers. I'm hoping someone may have an idea. It has been
particularly hard to work on because I don't have a Mac to work on, and
therefore can't really tinker. I have to try changing something and
then wait for access to a Mac to test it.

Thanks for your time,

Ken Walden

 

[brucie]

The URL is http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/...ordsworthcoop.com/new/&warning=1&profile=css2

If you have access to IE 5 on a Mac, and can look at it, and have any
guess as to why it looks like this,

i wouldn't waste my time pandering to such a prehistoric browser.

you're probably gunna need to read these:

How to post from Google:
http://www.safalra.com/special/googlegroupsreply/

How do I quote correctly in Usenet? - Quoting and Answering
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html

 

[dorayme]

Hello all,

I have a crudely put together web site I've fashioned for our business,
which is now displaying fine on all the browsers I've been able to try,
except for IE 5 on Mac. And it's totally dead on there.

The URL is http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/

If you have access to IE 5 on a Mac, and can look at it, and have any
guess as to why it looks like this, I would love to hear it. What I see
when I look is that the the whole page spans off of the right edge of
the screen (even though it's supposed to only have a width of 800) and
worse, there's no horizontal scrollbar. It appears that none of the
text in the main column is wrapping, the third column isn't even
visible.

The site is a rather crude combination of CSS and tables that I hacked
together as I was learning how to deal with CSS. So I imagine that
something in there has bogeyed it all up. I have searched the web high
and low and seen no mention of anything similar. I know have found some
ways that I could probably better design it without tables, but at this
point I'd rather just get it up, especially since it works in all the
other browsers. I'm hoping someone may have an idea. It has been
particularly hard to work on because I don't have a Mac to work on, and
therefore can't really tinker. I have to try changing something and
then wait for access to a Mac to test it.

Thanks for your time,

Ken Walden

It is not a pretty site in IE5 Mac, true. You need to do
detective work. Turn off all styles and see what is what. No
time now, but if the problem is not solved soon I will take a
closer look. I notice (something topical lately!) you have
comments in your css like

<--! particular style changes I added outside of the default
section-->

This is not right. Use /* blah blah */

Put "" around your things in your html like the "750" in your
"width=750" and put height for images as well as width and stop
leaving out the "; at the end of things as in your

H1 { font-size: x-large }
H2 { font-size: large }
H3 { font-size: normal }

And this alone will muck up a lot of css implementation, so fix
/all this stuff/ you can up first... Get a tute on CSS and
attend to the simple things of the language at least.

 

[dorayme]

Put "" around your things in your html like the "750" in your
"width=750" and put height for images as well as width and stop
leaving out the "; at t

oops... typo:

should have been stop leaving out the ";"

Don't leave out the semi-colon at the ends in the css. You /can/
leave off the final one in a set of them but don't worry about
this, just always put them in.

Since read advice about "not pandering" to the browser
concerned. Nah! Pander and you will be richly rewarded. It will
come up at the gates of St Peters and it might well make the
difference to whether you go up or down. You are probably like
me, not a perfect being, so err on the side of caution and give
yourself every chance at this fateful meeting...

 

[dorayme]

and do put # in front of colour numbers and ...

that's it, I am packing up for the day...

 

[Andy Dingley]

now displaying fine on all the browsers I've been able to try,
except for IE 5 on Mac. And it's totally dead on there.

The URL is http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/

IE5/Mac is monumentally broken. It also has so few users that it's
really not worth worrying about. However you probably want to fix this,
so...

IE5/Mac is probably _most_ broken when it comes to its parser. It has a
habit of encountering really trivial invalidities (or even valid code it
simply doesn't like) then abandoning that whole section for rendering.
Be _very_ careful about issues like bad syntax (your incorrect comment
marker in the CSS) always quoting attributes and not including optional
whitespace if you can avoid it. Extra whitespace in the value of a class
attribute is an infamous IE/Mac killer.

 

[Ken Walden]

IE5/Mac is monumentally broken. It also has so few users that it's

really not worth worrying about. However you probably want to fix this,
so...

It's true. I found out about it because some of my partners in my
business actually use it, so I can't quite discount it as being an
artifact.

Thank you Andy, dorayme and Brucie for all your advice. I'm going to
sit down today and fix all those errors and see if that helps. I do
feel the need to point out in my defense that I have found many guides
to CSS in order how to learn how to do any of this, and those guides
are what told me to write comments in those ways. And some of the
errors you point out are things I copied and pasted directly from guide
sites. I don't know enough to make this stuff up, lol. It's hard to
know who to trust on the Web if you don't already know what you're
talking about.

Thanks again, I'll let you know if it works.

Ken Walden

 

[brucie]

It's true. I found out about it because some of my partners in my
business actually use it, so I can't quite discount it as being an
artifact.

have them killed, much more fun and easier than continuing to support a
prehistoric browser.

I do feel the need to point out in my defense that I have found many
guides to CSS in order how to learn how to do any of this, and those
guides are what told me to write comments in those ways.

4.1.9 Comments
Comments begin with the characters "/*" and end with the characters "*/".
They may occur anywhere between tokens, and their contents have no
influence on the rendering. Comments may not be nested.

CSS also allows the SGML comment delimiters ("<!--" and "-->") in certain
places, but they do not delimit CSS comments. They are permitted so that
style rules appearing in an HTML source document (in the STYLE element) may
be hidden from pre-HTML 3.2 user agents. See the HTML 4.0 specification
([HTML40]) for more information.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#comments

It's hard to know who to trust on the Web if you don't already know what
you're talking about.

horses mouth:
http://w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cover.html
http://w3.org/TR/CSS21/cover.html

 

[Ken Walden]

Oh I remembered another interesting thing to point out. Basically all
of the pages are broken the same on my site, except for one. If you
navigate to http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/who.htm you will see that
this one renders the header and the central text correctly (although
the footer is still messed up).

I have cleared up all those mistakes in coding you all pointed out. It
didn't make a difference. I guess I am going to try getting rid of
whitespace next and see if that makes a difference.

Thanks,

Ken Walden

 

[Ken Walden]

Me again.

All right, I tried fixing all the coding mistakes I know of. I made
sure the CSS validated at the W3C site. I removed all the extra
whitespace from my style sheet. I tried removing the link to the style
sheet from the html. Without the style sheet it renders "correctly". So
does that tell me that the error is coming from something inside the
style sheet itself? Or could it still be an application of css in my
html?

I guess I will try removing styles one by one. This is a bit cumbersome
because the only Mac I have access to is at the other end of the
building, but if it ends this, it will be worth it.

Ken Walden

 

[Nick Theodorakis]

Me again.

[snip re: dealing with Mac IE5 CSS bugs]

<http://www.macedition.com/cb/ie5macbugs/>

Nick

 

[dorayme]

IE5/Mac is monumentally broken. It also has so few users that it's
really not worth worrying about.

Well, this may be so depending on various assumptions. When
something looks absolutely terrible in IE5 Mac, it is almost
always the case (up to recent times at least) that the page has
dreadful faults; of concept, design, html and css. IE Mac is a
nice test (increasingly less useful from now on perhaps or
hopefully) of a site made by not over sophisticated folk who
are often over-reaching...

 

[dorayme]

Oh I remembered another interesting thing to point out. Basically all
of the pages are broken the same on my site, except for one. If you
navigate to http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/who.htm you will see that
this one renders the header and the central text correctly (although
the footer is still messed up).

I have cleared up all those mistakes in coding you all pointed out. It
didn't make a difference. I guess I am going to try getting rid of
whitespace next and see if that makes a difference.

You didn't quite clear them all up (still no height for some of your
images, quote marks and stuff... I also notice your images on your server
are not even the widths you specify...); but anyway, you have
done a lot of them...

You will get better results in my opinion if you leave out the
fancy doodle dandy line in the css that goes:

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, P, UL, OL, DIR, MENU, DIV, DT, DD,
ADDRESS, BLOCKQUOTE, PRE, BR, HR, FORM, DL {display: block;}

It starts to look respectable in Mac IE 5 then...

I don't quite follow all the specs for widths you give, seems
very constrained but anyway, I think that line above is the
trouble on a quick test? This might keep those fellows down the
corridor happy...

 

[Andy Dingley]

When
something looks absolutely terrible in IE5 Mac, it is almost
always the case (up to recent times at least) that the page has
dreadful faults;

Try the two fragments:

<div class="foo bar" >

<div class="foo bar" >

The first works fine in IE/Mac, the second vanishes. Hardly a "dreadful
fault" in the coding though.

 

[Dylan Parry]

Trapped in the departure lounge at alt.html, Andy Dingley got bored and
wrote:

The first works fine in IE/Mac, the second vanishes.

IE5/Mac is notorious for mucking up when it comes across /optional/
spaces. Having said that, so few people use IE5/Mac now that I don't
personally think it's worth worrying about. Just make sure that the
content is presented in an acceptable way.

 

[dorayme]

Try the two fragments:

<div class="foo bar" >

<div class="foo bar" >

The first works fine in IE/Mac, the second vanishes. Hardly a "dreadful
fault" in the coding though.

Not quite sure the relevance of your remark to what I said? But
I found it interesting anyway, tested it and it is not true. If
I have your meaning right? Works fine in my IE Mac...

 

[dorayme]

so few people use IE5/Mac now that I don't
personally think it's worth worrying about.

This gets repeated over and over. Who knows the absolute
numbers? The point you miss is that some of the finest
characters in this world still use IE Mac and how wise or just
is it to ignore them?

--
dorayme

relax everyone, people should make sure that their webpages are
good before complaining about IE Mac, the complaints should come
second not first...

 

[Dylan Parry]

Trapped in the departure lounge at alt.html, dorayme got bored and
wrote:

The point you miss is that some of the finest characters in this world
still use IE Mac and how wise or just is it to ignore them?

I didn't say you could ignore them outright, but "make sure that the
content is presented in an acceptable way" in the same way as you
wouldn't go out of your way to make sure a site looks pixel-perfect in
NS4.

 

[Joel Shepherd]

i wouldn't waste my time pandering to such a prehistoric browser.

Unfortunately, that's the latest and probably last version of IE
available for the Mac. If you're stuck having to access an IE-biased
site, it's about the only choice you have. Happily, Mac IE was somewhat
more advanced than its Windows equivalent.

Not long ago, a feature on our site broke for Mac IE5, and promptly
experienced a 3% decline in usage. Ignoring it is not completely risk
free.

 

[kchayka]

IE 5 on Mac. And it's totally dead on there.

The URL is http://www.wordsworthcoop.com/new/

In your stylesheet:

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, P, UL, OL, DIR, MENU, DIV, DT, DD, ADDRESS,
BLOCKQUOTE, PRE, BR, HR, FORM, DL {display: block;}

B, STRONG, I, EM, CITE, VAR, TT, CODE, KBD, SAMP, IMG, SPAN {display:
inline;}

LI {display: list-item;}

Why? It's not only superfluous for a conforming browser, but potentially
dangerous for a quirky one. MacIE surely falls in the latter group.
Don't tempt it.