How to fix Internet Explorer messing up webpages...

Asked by Phillyzero (129

) October 31st, 2008

Well, my site: http://blackrussiancomics.com loads perfectly in firefox but not so for internet explorer. I’ve had to do numerous changes to the template and making some cuts that I did not want to.

Right now, if you view it in IE, there ‘should’ be no differences than in FF (if there are please let me know), but I’m just wondering is there any way to get around this? Is there anyway to know that something will not work in IE specifically? I’m using wordpress and my coding knowledge is minimal. Before my fixes, the sidebars would be distorted or the colours would overlap (i.e. footer color when be the body color, same with sidebars), I solved this by changing everything to white…sorry about the rant.

Note; I’ve found that IE 8 beta has a compatibility button, which when active, shows no errors.

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3 Answers

Unfortunately, this is the way Internet Explorer is. Very fickle.

You generally have about a years worth of experience with CSS and HTML before you can figure out problems and really fix them with IE.

I know what certain things are different in IE compared with standard compliant browsers, but i couldn’t tell you off the top of my head unfortunately, its just something that I can sort of just tell as i am writing the HTML or CSS. Its kinda like an unfortunate 6th sense.
(my internet-explorer-fail sense is tingling…)

philo23 (193

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There are a number of ways to hack your stylesheet so that only certain declarations will be read by IE ( * html .myClass { /IE-only styles/ } – I think… ), or you can use JavaScript to figure out which browser the user is running before loading the page and grab a sheet made just for any one of them.

Neither of those are terribly elegant and require a little more work, but after doing a few sites that way you’ll learn what blows IE up in the first place and figure out alternate ways to design stuff. And you’ll always have JS for when it’s absolutely necessary.

JoeyDesignsStuff (756

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