IE 5.5 and below woes!

[LizzyB]

Hi - sorry for the amount of questions today!

Following another example from a book today. I have followed all the code and find that a supposed fixed width page with box model hacks for IE5.5 and below is not working at all. The width on the body is being ignored and the right nav box is on the right of the window - not the right of the width.
I tried adding in a wrapper tag putting in the width in here (moving from the body) but this then blows the content box downwards.

The page is here:
http://www.whizzliz.co.uk/templates/WhizzLiz/Floating_Layouts/Fixed-3col.html

Any help is gratefuly received - i am pulling my hair out today.
Liz

PS - working fine on IE 6,7 and FF

[dtm32236]

why are you so concerned with IE5.5 and below? less than 1% of the population still uses it according to every browser statistic site i've looked at (even though they're not REALLY accurate, all of them seem to agree on about 1%)

[LizzyB]

because im a perfectionist and also I meant to say its not working in IE 6 properly either and that really is a problem.

Liz

[dtm32236]

IE6 is a problem - tons of people still use IE6...

i have a lot of work to do, i can't focus on this now - but hopefully later on I can help you out if no one else can by then.

good luck with it in the mean time.

[TJ111]

I'd try changing the margins for the content div from fixed width in pixels to just :auto; . I was looking through your portfolio, you have some pretty original designs, very nice.

[LizzyB]

Hi,

I tried changing to auto but got some unexpected results.

I have multiple IE on my machine and can see this:

IE 5.0.1 - works fine except there is a slight margin above the box compared with the nav boxs (athough i could live with that)

IE5.5 - perfect

IE 6 - still same problem

Liz

[felgall]

With a valid doctype as the very first thing in the file IE6 goes into standards mode where it correctly determines box sizes and no longer requires a hack to fix it. IE6 only has that problem in quirks mode (where it does its own thing on many other parts of the page layout as well). There are hundreds of browsers that are both more modern and have a larger number of users than IE5.5 but unless you have at least a hundred thousand visitors a day none of those browsers will have enough visitors to worry about. IE5 users should be used to web pages looking jumbled by now, if you use obsolete hacks to try to fix the page you will just confuse them and encourage them to continue to use that antique instead of getting a web browser.

[LizzyB]

I realised i put IE6 into standards mode so Im a bit foxed as to why that one was playing up.

I have now found a fix which works in all IEs plus FF. The fix was to remove the right margin. I guess that by putting a left margin and a width the content wont spill into the right nav anyway.

Im still perplexed as to why i am following text book example and ive had to rewrite it to bits to get it to work - shame the author hasnt put his email address in the book!

Thanks for your help .

PS - thanks to the posted who liked my portfolio. Basically Im a working mum who builds cheap sites for other mums. Many have very old PCs which is why im a stickler for getting these to work. All my designs so far have been bought as templates or made to work more through luck than judgement. Im determined to be able to understand how CSS works properly now though!

[drhowarddrfine]

I realised i put IE6 into standards mode so Im a bit foxed as to why that one was playing up.Even in standards mode, IE6 and 7 are the worst browsers on the planet. Don't rely on them to do anything right.