Looks like another calculation bug in IE

Written in the mid-afternoon in English • Tags: ,

The recent Microsot Internet Explorer (IE) problem was bothering me, because it meant the pages were not usable with IE. I wouldn’t mind a cosmetic problem as much (even though they tend to get to me, too) but links not working and pictures not being visible is just too annoying.

I was playing with the CSS, experimenting with the “floating dt” that I had avoided in the last workaround due to it “disappearing” on IE. When I made the dd element floating as well, I saw that IE was rendering the contents below and outside the white box (#envelope) that holds the main content on each page. In the past this has been a giveaway for IE miscalculating the size of the containing element, and sure enough — the “fix” was an added width: 100% property for the misbehaving container.

The “invisible images” were restored to visibility with the same fix on the appropriate container. I’m glad it didn’t need another couple of hours of CSS tweaking in the dark.

It’s nice to have the site working again, but I’d rather not spend my free time on something stupid like inventing workarounds for a buggy browser. (Not that I expect Microsoft to pick up any hints from here.)

Enjoy!

»
Note to self: always check the voltage selector before plugging in anything. Now I can’t rip CD’s before I find a new power supply for the machine with the Plextor CD-ROM, or move the SCSI subsystem to another machine. Provided nothing else fried than the power…

Who broke IE again?

Written early in the afternoon in English • Tags: ,

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)