‘No Bed’ Bugs

I’m planning on waking up early tomorrow, but right now I’m up later than I should be fighting with IE5/MAC’s CSS implementation. For CSS1 it’s great, but it’s hit and miss for anything reaching into CSS2. I’ve just spent a couple of hours trying work-around after work-around in order to apply the formatting I want to a table—no border except the right hand side of each cell. I finally figured it out, though not without resorting to a CSS/HTML attribute hybrid.

As I start to do more and more CSS intensive layouts, IE5/MAC is my biggest obstacle. On Windows you can assume people are running at least IE5, which has decent, though not great CSS2 support. Lots of them are running IE6, with nearly full support. Luckily, Microsoft tries to force IE6 onto everyone that uses Windows Update, so the penetration numbers should keep rising.

NS7 is terrific, with almost complete support for CSS2. If everyone ran that or Mozilla my world would be a hell of a lot easier. At least both of those have good consistency across any OS, so if it works in NS7 Windows I can count on it working elsewhere.

In conclusion of this rather boring entry, here are some pages that might help you overcome the same problems that I’ve had with my CSS layouts in IE5/MAC:

CSS Bugs in IE5.x Mac
MacEdition Guide to CSS Support for Tables
CSS Hints for Internet Explorer 5
Commented Backslash MacIE5 CSS Hack
CSS Master Grid (slightly out of date, but useful)

View Comments (10)

# December 03, 2002 12:50 AM

Comments

thanks, simon! yeah, ie5 has been giving me a few css headaches, too. i usually just use straight html for tables and limit css to text and other style attributes. i’ll see what else i can do now. btw, i disagree about the greatness of ns7 or mozilla. they do show css really well, but are somewhat clunky on other areas (at least on my mac). i hate to say it, but ie5 is still the superior browser. maybe if i had a g4 that would change …

Posted by: miguel on December 3, 2002 1:19 AM

Perhaps you’re right about NS7/MAC; my experience is mainly with its Windows counterpart which clears up all the buggy crashes that NS6 had, while implementing standards quite well. The look and feel or form elements aren�t as good as in IE though. My trouble with this table styling was that I needed to do something that isn’t possible with straight HTML. With table attributes you can give every cell padding and spacing, which simulates a border - but I needed borders on only the right hand side of each cell. Tricky.

Posted by: simon on December 3, 2002 1:26 AM

have you tried using color tables as borders? instead of a cell, imagine a 3x3 cell. the top, bottom, and right outside cells are the borders (so like one pixel or whatever w/ a solid color or even an image) and the left outside cells the same as the central cell. that’s the “workaround” i’d use. just a thought. oh, also … on your weblog a few times there are these semi-links that are dotted and make my cursor produce a question mark. what do they do? clicking on them does nothing. is this a windows-only thing? i’ve tried it on ie5.2, ns7, and the latest mozilla build. same thing.

Posted by: miguel on December 3, 2002 11:43 AM

Those are acronym information. If you hover over them for a second a tool-tip should come up that tells you what the acronym stands for. The code looks like this: <style> acronym { border-bottom: 1px dotted #cfbda0; cursor: help; } </style> <acronym title=”International Business Machines”>IBM</acronym>

Posted by: simon on December 3, 2002 11:57 AM

huh?

Posted by: eric on December 3, 2002 12:38 PM

the tag isn’t working on my ibook, even w/ ie5.2. it’s just a giant “?” that lingers (i’ve even tried waiting about half a minute w/o moving the cursor).

Posted by: miguel on December 3, 2002 1:43 PM

That’s odd; IE/MAC supports the title attribute, which is what’s really making this thing work. It’s possible that it doesn’t support titles on the acronym tag, but does on other tags, such as anchors. Try hovering over this link. Do you see the tool tip appear? You’re supposed to be able to see title attributes on any element…oh well, at least it doesn’t break anything. I might use the hack noted above to hide the underline and help cursor from IE/MAC.

Posted by: simon on December 3, 2002 1:50 PM

simon: you’re a genius! the little link in your last comment worked flawlessly. thanks for my personal surprise msg.

Posted by: miguel on December 3, 2002 1:55 PM

All of this jargon is making me want to kiss you simon.

Posted by: meredith on December 3, 2002 5:32 PM

umm, i don’t know jack shit about computers, but this is nina…hi…

Posted by: nina on December 3, 2002 11:30 PM

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‘No Bed’ Bugs

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