[thelist] Site critique/check of CSS positioning in IE 5 (PC)

Andy Warwick andy.war at ntlworld.com
Tue May 29 05:48:29 CDT 2001


on 2001/05/29 11:34 am, Alastair Murdoch at alastair at cubeit.co.uk wrote:

> OK, platform is win 2000
> 
> In IE5.5:  Site looks ok at fullscreen 1024*768 but upon resizing to a
> smaller window causes the text to overlay the bottom blue bar.

> In NS6: Again site look ok fullscreen but even a small amount of re-sizing
> causes horizontal scrollbars and the text to start overlaying the bottom bar
> again.

Alastair

I take it the blue bottom bar doesn't move to fit flush to the bottom of the
browser window in these cases? (Like it should...)
  
> Opera 5.11:  I'm guessing that this is what it's supposed to do, re-sizing
> causes the text and blue bottom bar to re-flow properly, and the scrollbars
> that appear to cause the body text to move up and down/side to side while
> all the other elements stay positioned.

Yeah - sounds like that is working right; though the scrollbars appearing to
move it left and right is a bit odd, as the content text is meant to be
fixed at 65% of the browser width and only vertical scrollbars should
appear. If you imagine that the top, navigation and bottom bars form static
frames around the content, and when the browser window is shrunk the text
should scroll in-front-of/behind the top and bottom areas you can confirm
what should be happening.
 
> Netscape 4.7:  Surprised the hell out of me, but things see to work OK.
> Text and bar re-flow sensibly when re-sized and everything looks OK.
> Scrollbars move the entire page, but I'm unsure if this is what you want or
> just something opera does so I can't comment.

Scrollbars moving the whole page is what should happen to those browsers
that don't do CSS positioning; the intention is that it degrades gracefully,
so that the 4 tables that make up the content simply flow into static
positions that mimic the positioned layout, but without the fixed
CSS-positioned regions.

At least I got that to work okay :)

The problems seems to be with browsers that handle CSS positioning, but do
it badly, rather than just ignoring it completely and sticking to document
flow.

Looks like Opera (all platforms) and Mac IE 5.0 do it right. Netscape 6 and
Mozilla on all platforms should also play nice. IE 5.0 on a PC *should*
work, but on my machine at least it chokes attempting it, rather than simply
not trying at all.

Thanks for looking.

Regards

Andy Warwick





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