"Designers" --- How do you handle MSIE?

dalecosp

IE's faults in regard to CSS are well-documented --- or, at least, well-discussed. I've many times sent a link to the boss and had him tell me the layout was broken --- even after I tested it in IE. Quirks-mode, Compatibility Mode ... screen resolution. You can build a page, view it in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari ... and when you open it in IE, you're left scratching your head.

So, my question, how do you handle this? I've tried several different strategies in my "lifetime", including PHP browser detection and separate stylesheets, IE conditional comments, and more.

See the attached poll ... it's multiple choice, but don't be too frivolous with your answers, please

NogDog

Mostly I just try to make sure that the very first thing the browser sees is a valid doctype declaration, getting IE out of "quirks mode". That seems to take care of 99% of the most common problems, then if I do run into something in IE that I actually care about and must fix, I'll typically try the IE conditional comments thing -- but really that seldom is needed.

dalecosp

Sounds like a plan --- unfortunately, I'm writing little new code, and charged with maintaining loads of stuff that was churned out by semi-professional CFML programmers in the late 90's.

Of course, I'm a semi-professional PHP coder... but that's better, right? 😃

dalecosp

Heh, heh.

Reading some support code in a $1k package our firm has ...

/* have to specify the width of the middle part of the title bars
 because IE is too stupid to figure it out on its own */
.halfTitle {
        width: 276px;

joomlads07

When using an SSL connection to a server that uses keep-alive, a bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer causes DWR to randomly alert 'No data received from server'.

However, if you neither have control over the browsers nor the server settings, there is a nice workaround. MSIE uses HTTP status codes above 12000 to signal that the SSL connection has been aborted. If a request contains this status code the request can simply be repeated and will probably succeed.

cretaceous

working on new builds it's not so bad as you tend to know what will cause problems in IE
- but working on old sites must a nightmare

you're really doing maintenance work on something that's thirteen years old?
- they should just dump it and start afresh

I still think css has lot to answer for - it has never addressed some design led issues that come up again and again and can only be fixed through stupid workarounds - things like equal height columns with coloured backgrounds or aligning text to drop to base of the containing object
(inline hacks in a single css style sheet is the way to go imho)

dalecosp

cretaceous;10973724 wrote:
you're really doing maintenance work on something that's thirteen years old?
- they should just dump it and start afresh

Yes, and that's in the plans, so I hear. One of the tasks on the horizon is for me to figure out the DB's behind the old sites and how we can migrate them to MySQL underneath vBulletin so we don't lose the accumulated wisdom of the last decade or so when we move these (half dozen or so) sites to PHP/MySQL.

But, meantime, they want to change the layout of the old CFML sites (which are forums, similar to this one, but not for compu-geeks) so that the adverts and other links point to their newest PHP-based site, which they hope will carry the business into the future and replace the income lost when they discontinue printing a paper magazine in the very near future.

I'm keeping my resume polished 😉