Off topic: IE7 was Re: [sdiy] Digital noise source project (replacing MN5837 in Prophet 5and Monopoly)

[Donald Tillman]

   > From: Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net>
   > Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 00:42:40 +0100
   > 
   > Yes, someone else brought this to my attention too. It does seem to  
   > be an Explorer issue. I endeavoured to write a good, clean webpage  
   > technically speaking, and the pages validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict, so  
   > as far as I'm concerned that's as much as I can do. If your browser  
   > won't play with that, you should really think about upgrading.

There are serious bugs in MSIE6 and MSIE7 that break the presentation
of fixed position elements.  MSIE6 doesn't implement fixed positioning
at all, and MSIE7 doesn't do the positioning correctly.  (Lovely!)

But there are workarounds; it is possible to do a site that displays
fixed positioning in browsers that implement the W3C standards
(Firefox, Safari, etc), still display correctly in MSIE7, and still
display in a graceful way in MSIE6.

I had a similar problem with my BayProg site (progressive rock music
resources for local San Francisco Bay area musicians and fans:
http://www.bayprog.org).  I built it in XHTML 1.0 Strict, and similar
to you I did a fixed position header and menu, and the fixed
positioning was missing in MSIE6 and way off in MSIE7.  I was finally
able to spend some time to work around it, and you can check out the
style sheet there.

The trick is to first pretend that you're running on MSIE6 where fixed
positioning is not supported, get that looking good, then add CSS ">"
child selector feature specs, which MSIE6 ignores, to do your fixed
positioned specs, and for other elements that need to be moved over to
accommodate fixed positioned elements.  And avoid the parameters that
MSIE7 screws up.

Yes, it completely sucks, but that's what you have to do.

(Note that even the official W3C style sheet page hacks around this.
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/   Aiiiighhh!!)

(If you're interested in this crazy stuff I highly recommend the book
"The Zen of CSS Design" by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag.  It has an
accompanying web site: http://www.csszengarden.com .  It's a very cool
project; these folks created a basic web page in XHTML 1.0 Strict with
absolutely no formatting, and invited creative artists to make it
pretty, but only by submitting CSS style sheets.  The contestants
weren't allowed to change the HTML at all.  The results are
impressive, and the book uses the examples as an opportunity to
discuss all sorts of presentation issues.)

(If can hype my BayProg site, then it's not entirely off topic,
right?)

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com