Commentag now compatible IE6
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008It took a bunch of hours but now it is done.
How come can people still use IE? It is pure rubbish and a real nightmarre for web developpers.
Anyway. I’ve borrowed an old and noisy Dell Inspiron 5100 which runs IE6 and I spent my last evening focusing on making IE6 understands standards.
The most annoying thing is its lack of support of transparent PNG files. I’ve used the excellent script of 24ways which takes advantage of the IE-only functionality of post processing a page using an AlphaFilter.
More info here.
Amongst other hacks I had to go through, there is to mention that there is a way to specifiy CSS properties which will be only interpreted by IE6.
For example, if you start your CSS property with an underscore (eg. _background: …) then only IE6 will interpret it.
In the same way, if you start with a double slash (eg. // background: …) then all browsers but IEx will interpret it (note: the standard way to put comments in a CSS file is only to use the delimiters /* … */ ).
Last but not least, Firefox and Safari both consider a defaut left margin of 0px for <ul> while IE6 does not.
So don’t forget to state
ul {
margin-left:0;
}
It also looks like floating elements do not always have a good presentation under IE6. Sometimes it’s better to put your object with a _position:absolute; (what I did for the commentag logo to make it overlap the main part of the site).
Other useful links to deal with compatibility issues between IEx, Firefox and Safari:
