[thelist] Re: CSS Positioning, Browsers (Was: any K-Meleon gotchas?)

[Leonard Lin]

Techwatcher wrote:

>Thanks, Leonard, for responding. You're right; the negative *border* was
>a hack I introduced (as recommended by another evolter) because negative
>*margin* didn't work on my client's (IE 6?) browser.
>
>
Hmm, IE6 supports negative margins, but it does work, but will be
doubled due to the horizontal margin/float bug PC IE5+ has
(http://randomfoo.net/sandbox/style/ie6margin/) .

>What would you recommend to get the entire (viewport) page to have wide
>margins, but at the top, have floated left and right logo and linkages?
>Originally, I set margins for all types of elements used, individually,
>which was inelegant (i.e., specify wide margins for hn, p, ul [other
>than specified class nav], images [other than specified image logo],
>etc.) I would have liked to use body, but in CSS2 that's an inline
>element, so I set basic margins on the HTML element. But my logo and
>nav-aid are exceptions to the setting for HTML, so I tried to float them
>beyond the margins. But setting margin to be negative failed on the
>browser the client happened to have. Sigh...
>
>
If you're just trying to set the logo and nav elements on the top/sides,
I would use absolute positioning.

#logo { position:absolute; left:0px; top:0px; }
#nav { position:absolute; right:0px; top:0px; }

One advantage of this is that it should work in ns4 as well, and of
course, avoids the float messiness entirely.

>Btw, I have IE 2.0 (!) and plan to keep it to test "degraded" CSS, so I
>don't want to load another IE browser with which to experiment. (I read
>recently -- Eric's article? -- that it is only possible to have one IE
>browser on a machine.) I also have Nav. 4.0 (only because I have CD for
>that one, so it's no 1-2 hr. download), just got Opera 6, but plan to
>use K-Meleon as my primary browser.
>
If you want to test multiple versions of IE on a single machine, the
easiest way is with something like VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/).  If
you're doing this professionally (ie, creating websites for a living),
you're going to have to bite the bullet and get IE5.0, IE5.5, and IE6.0
installed, as typically, 80-95% of your audience will be using one of
those browsers.  For testing, ns4, I just use Navigator 4.08 and
Communicator 4.79 (the latest versions of those respective browsers).
 K-Meleon is good for general use, and especially for slower machines,
but for developers, I would recommending going whole hog w/ the latest
version of Mozilla.  The JS Console/Debugger, DOM Inspector, and
sidebars are invaluable.

>(I *love* K-Meleon! Fast to download, works fast, renders really well,
>except that color has to be >64k or look weird, but who cares -- unless
>it's a gallery site? I'm going to recommend K-Meleon to all users of old
>browsers I see from now on.)
>
>
The less people using ns4 the better.


.l