IE 6 Display horrors

[llanitedave]

I put together a web site (http://www.birdandflower.com/amargosa/) intended primarily for family and friends. It validates fine in tidy html validator from my Bluefish editor. It looks great in Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Konqueror. But I'd gotten some complaints from people using Internet Explorer.

I just viewed it in IE6 from work, and I was horrified!!

Pictures were rotated, stacked inconsistently, compressed horizontally, pixelated... a caption displaced...

It was a mess!

I know that IE doesn't follow all the CSS standards, but I wasn't really doing anything fancy...

Do I HAVE to use tables to make pages work in IE? Can someone a bit more sophisticated in cross-platform browser issues give me a kick in the right direction?

[Annaccond]

Talking honestly your site looks horrible in both browsers (IE and FF) because both don't show her correct - and IE show this page more correctly as FF (I don't see any horror about which you wrote :confused: ). What's the best this site will never be showing properly (in all browsers) because you used absolute positioning for many elements and so on...

My advice: resign from CSS positioning and put all content in table. All alignments and colors and sizes will be showing properly because you'll have full control where have to be which background, where have to be pic etc. Effect with CSS will be different everywhere because every browser showing some properties a little bit different, not counting that all browsers attend CSS2 partially.

P.S. there's no something like "font" property which you putted in your CSS, please change it to "font-family" :)

[scottrickman]

My advice: learn css positioning DO NOT put your content into a table. Build the site for Firefox (standards) then use well publicised css hacks to 'fix' for IE. When you're happy with what you have validate your HTML and CSS.

[llanitedave]

Well, I built the site for Firefox using CSS, and as I said, it looks fine on Firefox, Safari, and Konqueror. I'm using a 17" CRT on an eMac running OS X 10.4, a 17" LCD screen on Kubuntu, and a 12.1" screen on a G4 iBook -- dual booting with OS X 10.4 and Kubuntu.

It looks fine on all these. My work computer is Windows 2000 using IE 6.0 and a 17" LCD screen. That's where it screws up.

Annaccond, yours is the first report I've gotten of problems in Firefox. Would you mind saying what the problems are? And what are you using IE on that makes it look ok? Could it be your screen resolution settings?


Scottrickman, assuming that I take your advice and have it validating on Firefox(which it does), what IE "hacks" would we be talking about?

Thanks for staying with me this far, guys.

[7Changedotcom]

I looked at in IE 6 and only noticed one little difference of course I think the errors may show up more based on your screen resolution. Tables are definitely a lot more convenient as far as positioning to display correctly in all browsers however many of the controls that allow you to design a layout with tables are deprecated. I'd be interested in knowing where you find these hacks for CSS. I made my first layout page (http://www.7change.com/layouts/1/) with CSS, which works great in IE 6, most of the CSS features actually work properly in IE 6, but don't work in IE7 or FF.