A while ago, we got contacted at Drupal.org by the Internet Explorer 7 compatibility team about layout issues in IE7 on our site. The e-mail was intended to help web developers prepare for IE7 by pointing out problems. My guess was that Microsoft had used a web crawler to look for various CSS signposts (with human verification afterwards):
"The page www.drupal.org does not display properly in IE 7 due to specific CSS Hacks that we have deprecated in IE 7. We believe that this issue is likely caused by the use of the Underscore, html>body and Star HTML Hacks on your CSS file which has been removed from IE 7. In IE 6, the layout appears correct since the specific hack being used is supported in that version of IE.
...
Removal of these hacks will resolve this issue."
I got really annoyed by that last line because it's plain untrue. What's worse is that I've noticed similar comments made by others in the Drupal community (and elsewhere): "[Some site] is broken in IE7 because they use IE6 hacks". As the person who designed the Drupal.org theme, I want to clear this up because it's a big fat lie and it's easy to see why.
Any sane designer these days will design for the standards-compliant browsers like Firefox and then sprinkle on CSS hacks to make it work in IE6. The very nature of these hacks is that they are invalid CSS, which only IE6 considers valid (e.g. a { _display: none; }). Standards-compliant browsers ignore invalid CSS rules (as specified in the specs), so the hacks have no effect on them.
Because IE7 fixed the parsing bugs, it can now be considered one of those standards-compliant browsers (for parsing CSS anyway). This means that whether IE6 hacks are present or not will have no effect whatsoever on how the site looks in IE7.
So, whether intentional or not, Microsoft has been flat out lying. And by doing so they're shifting the blame for their screw-ups to the same designers they've been torturing for years.
Well, I'm tired of taking the blame: my design works fine in those programs that are worthy of the name browser.
The design on drupal.org is
The design on drupal.org is pretty cool but I have to say the coding is not good at all. It flickers a lot on ie6 and it's impossible to select text on many parts of the site.
It's very annoying to have to boot up the slowass firefox browser if I can't select nothing in Avant browser.
Do you think if I fix up the code for you, you can get it on the live drupal site?
btw I love your avs, I've enjoyed them a lot even before I knew anything about drupal lol, small world.
IE7 CSS *is* broken
I'm programming a site that uses a very simple 2-column layout using a normal-flow column on the left with a float column on the right, both of which are inside a container. In Firefox and Opera, both display perfectly. In IE7, the text in the float begins at a point above that in the normal-flow column. It is not much, but enough to make my site look unprofessional.
Thanks for speaking my mind
Thanks, this post manages to speak my (close to insane due to IE) mind, I agree 110%
What the....... Complient IE7 is not complient
Why are people saying that IE7 is compliant and will render pages like firefox and opera, i just did an acid test on all three browsers and opera wins. I do not even use opera.
IE7 looks like it took a ak47 to the little acid test
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top
guy, he is smeared all over the page.
As for people not upgrading to IE7, I read that the it will install as an XP hotfix, update, please, please some one say it aint true
Absolutely agree
After year of deep fight against MSIE bugs, they dare to say *we* are not compliant?
Why don't they just say sorry for driving crazy thousands of developers?
IE CSS bugs
Jordan: if you've really done advanced CSS, you'd know that browsers bugs are often triggered by a random combination of factors, that is hard to predict and hard to work around. The fact is that IE7 still has some serious bugs in its layout engine and that Microsoft tried to blame this on the use of CSS hacks, which was untrue.
Here's the test case for the problem we had on Drupal.org:
http://acko.net/dumpx/ie7drupal.html
Displays fine in all browsers, except for IE (all versions). In IE, the green floats (which have no defined widths) will refuse to shrink-wrap, because they are inside a 'position: absolute' container (bug). If you remove the position attribute, the floats shrink wrap in IE6 and 7, but this was not possible in the given design:
http://acko.net/dumpx/ie7drupal-no-absolute.html
However, by applying conditional CSS, or a CSS hack (_width: 0px), we can make it work in IE6, since 'width' is treated as 'min-width':
http://acko.net/dumpx/ie7drupal-with-hack.html
But we cannot use the same approach in IE7, as they fixed the behaviour of width/height, without fixing the actual bug I'm seeing. Whether your use an IE7 conditional comment or a CSS hack does not change anything here.
The only way around it was to significantly alter all structural/positioning styles for that section, and try to avoid triggering the bug.
Drupal.org's theme is completely tableless and source-ordered, and can have clears in any of its sections without float dropping. Sure it's not the prettiest design out there, but as far as CSS goes, it's pretty advanced.
But don't let me pierce your bubble. Please, continue to live in this bizarro world where IE6 and IE7 have perfect implementations of the CSS2.1 specifications, and where milk and honey rain down from the sky. Since you've never encountered such crippling issues, the world must be on crack, right?
IE 7
MS's actions make sense if IE7 parses better to avoid processing hack-hidden directives,
As someone stated before the
As someone stated before the reason IE havnt fixed their bugs / mis-interperetation with standards is because they want to be the only browser and so have tried to force us all to be bound by their laws. They have failed now with firefox being the dominent web browser. All these arguements and masses of hacks/conditional comments whatever to fix ie is all about IE. They are the ones that caused all this mess and now they are going down the toilet.
But its not like you can forget IE with still a large market share, because clients will not be happy. So we just have to continue with all this time wasting trying to fix IE.