Tag: IE6
First-letter bugginess
Recently I made some changes to the typography of subheadings on this site: I made them all uppercase and for the h2s I used the first-letter pseudo class to give the first letter a larger font-size (150%).
HTML/CSS newbie FAQs
After spending a while on web development forums, you start to see the same questions being asked regularly. So here I’m going to answer some of these common beginner questions and hopefully save me typing answers out repeatedly in the future because I can just refer the poster to here or copy it myself.
My website’s broken!
A furore has erupted over the past couple of days within a section of the web development community over a decision by Microsoft to require web developers to add a meta tag to their pages to define what version of Internet Explorer a site has been designed for. I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of this decision as it’s been comprehensively covered elsewhere.
Legends of style
UPDATE: following on from comments by Thierry Koblenz, I have written an update to this article. The techniques described below will still work in different browsers, but the new article explains how it can be achieved with a little less mark-up.
It’s a well-established fact that achieving cross browser consistency when styling form controls is an “exercise in futility”
. And one of those elements that just won’t play ball is the <legend> tag.
Why does my content flow outside its box?
Usually this question is accompanied by: “It looks fine in Internet Explorer but not Firefox”
and it’s usually because a height has been specified on the element in question.
Which browsers should I test in?
Well I’ve discussed which browser to avoid using for primary testing, and which browser I prefer to use, so which browsers should one test in?
Don’t use IE as your primary testing browser
As mentioned in previous posts, I spend some time on web design-related forums so a lot of what I’ve written on this site has been in response to questions I see asked quite often. This post is not so much about a question, but a reaction.
Why doesn’t :hover work in IE?
You may have seen on other sites an effect whereby the background colour of a containing element changes colour when you hover over it. A look at their CSS might reveal something like div:hover or li:hover. This is also how a lot of CSS dropdown menus work too, by applying a :hover to a list item.
Why does my layout look wrong in IE?
If your site looks right in a browser like Firefox, Opera or Mozilla, but not in Internet Explorer, it’s highly likely you’re being affected by one of IE’s numerous bugs.
Fortunately, most of these have been well-documented at Position is Everything.








