Manufacturer’s site layout fixed for IE6, IE7 browsers

Adam Khan, Monday, May 14th, 2007

The subtle differences among web browsers can make producing HTML and CSS for a web site tedious and time-consuming. In particular, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which dominated the market longer than it should have, creates problems for CSS coders because it has a number of insidious bugs and does not support some important CSS directives. Web pages that render properly on less popular but more standards-compliant and modern browers, such as Firefox, do not render properly on the older IE6 (or sometimes even the new IE7 for that matter).

BePrivy of Portland, Oregon were close to completing a new web site for a manufacturer of electronic equipment. But even as the site was displaying properly in Firefox, it was not in IE6 and IE7, and fixing it for those browers was becoming a drain on BePrivy’s time. They sought an HTML/CSS expert to fix the site for IE6 and IE7.

Solution

Having had plenty of experience with IE6 and IE7 issues while creating other sites, particularly the recent complex template at Extreme Elements, EngagingNet undertook the fix. It involved knowledge of the classic IE6 bugs, such as the 3-pixel jog, the lack of CSS directives min-height and max-height, and the retooling of some elements from absolutely positioned to floating. Although the CSS was stored in a relatively complex setup, there was nothing we hadn’t seen before in some way.

Results

As a result of the work, the new site now displays consistently across the browsers, and Jacob Reiff, BePrivy principal, concluded in an email: “Thanks so much for your help -— overall I’m very satisfied with the work you produced.”