Right column forced below content - IE bug

Posted by Alison@deanspace.org on August 5, 2009 at 5:06pm

I'm translating charityguide.org at the following development url: www.alisonstanton.com/charityguide

I have spent an untold number of hours trying to change the widths, re-changed every line of the zen layout-liquid.css, etc. to fix an IE7 bug which makes the right hand column display below the page content.

ANY thoughts would be appreciated.

Comments

#main-inner div

Posted by i-sibbot on August 6, 2009 at 10:51am

Just had a quick look. Something that stood out immediately is that your content and sidebar-right divs are wrapped in the main-inner div. Your sidebar-left isnt?

Before even beginning to

Posted by dman on August 6, 2009 at 11:16am

Before even beginning to debug IE, you should validate your page first.
If your page has serious syntax errors, you can't blame the browser for your own mistakes.

Not all validation errors are serious, (many are unneccessarily trivial) but many of the ones you have in there - unclosed quotes, unbalanced structural tags - certainly are bad news.

For a quick fix, stop lying and claiming the page is XHTML-strict. If you admit you are actually writing just plain old HTML4-transitional, you'll only get 1/4 of the complaints.

For a brute force solution, maybe you could try the htmltidy.module to cover up the worst of your mistakes ;-)

_{.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards}

Ouch....

Posted by i-sibbot on August 6, 2009 at 2:35pm

That was a bit cutting.

Yeah,

Posted by dman on August 6, 2009 at 3:28pm

Hey, if it was a quirks-mode sorta page, then browsers could be softer on it.
But the code has a big 'Kick me' sign on it.
Claiming XHTML-strict says "I know all the rules and I'm following them to the letter - browser obey my command!"
Making that claim and then producing tag soup and calling it an browser "bug" is asking for a spanking.

Lying to the browser about the content of your code is permitted in the spec to produce an 'undefined' result.

Not that IE layout might not be farked anyway - even after it's made valid ... but a huge number of such problems DO just dissolve away if the bad page syntax is repaired.
It's just web 101. Don't complain if broken code produces broken results.

_{.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards}