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IE5 css problem?

londonweb

londonweb

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 14, 2005
260
0
london
Can anyone offer some thoughts as to why my div backgrounds don't appear under IE5 for Mac? I know this is a dinosaur of a browser, but a surprising number of people still use it, and this is a really basic layout issue. Here is an extract from my css:

Code: 
#rightFill {
	position:fixed;
	top:0px;
	left:900px;
	width:100%;
	height:100%;
	background-color:#E3D9BC;
}

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
 
IE5:Mac doesn't properly support CSS. <-- Edit: As you'll see from later posts this statement might not be 100% formally correct until I added the word in green.

Use another browser. <-- Edit: This still stands, though... ;)

Forget IE5:Mac, Microsoft has... ;) <-- Edit: So does this... :D
 
Oddly, this works just fine for me in Mac IE 5.2:

[Edit: and OK in 5.0, under Classic, too.]

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<title>Meow</title>
<link href="meow.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="rightFill">
Meow meow meow!
</div>
</body>
</html>

meow.css:
Code: 
/* CSS Document */

#rightFill {
	position:fixed;
	top:0px;
	left:900px;
	width:100%;
	height:100%;
	background-color:#E3D9BC;
}
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
IE5:Mac doesn't support CSS. Use another browser.
Click to expand...

Please don't give such false information.

londonweb: I haven't opened IE5 for Mac in more than a year, but it is possible that it does not support position: fixed;

As Mitthrawnuruodo was trying to say, Microsoft stopped all support for IE Mac quite some time ago. Is there any reason that you absolutely need to support it?
 
mnkeybsness said:
Please don't give such false information.
Click to expand...
The list of quirks and hacks you need to add to make IE5 for Mac to work with CSS2 makes it functionally unsupported, IMO... ;)

The CSS1 support is fairly good, I'll give it that, but then I'll never actually used CSS1...

I've stopped making my pages IE5:Mac compatible long before Microsoft officially pulled the plug... (and by then, when was the last real update? 2000? And nothing at all since 2003?)

All in all, my original advice stands: Forget IE5:Mac! Seriously!

;)
 
mnkeybsness said:
londonweb: I haven't opened IE5 for Mac in more than a year, but it is possible that it does not support position: fixed;
Click to expand...

The real problem in this case is that the CSS spec poorly defined what 100% meant in that context. Without the enclosing block (in this case, the screen) explicitly defined, only covering the area containing text etc. was within spec.
 
mnkeybsness said:
IE5 Mac has better support than IE6 does... just thought I'd point that out.
Click to expand...
I'm not arguing with that, either... at all... :D

When it came it was light years ahead of IE5 for Windows, and IE6 has never really caught up... I'm actually hoping IE7 will make my day a lot easier... I doubt it, but I'm still hoping... :( ;)

IE is just bad, m'kay...
 
Oh yeah: the actual fix is to give the body an explicit height:

Code: 
body {
	height:100%;
}

(Just for kicks: this difference isn't a bug either in IE or the other browsers, the standard really does make the size of the initial block implementation-dependent!)
 
Hi guys, thanks for all your ideas.

iMeowBot: The only difference with my script is that I've used it with <span> tags not <divs>. I'll try it and see if there's any difference. Thanks for your tip with the body height as well. I'll try that too.

mnkeybsness: I don't specifically have to support IE5 mac, but as I said, a load of people are still using it. Until about 4 years ago macs were still shipping with it as standard and there are plenty of offices full of iMac G4s running IE5, unfortunately. I've had 3 clients (one of them is current) in the last few months who are still using it.

Mitthrawnuruodo: I'd love to 'forget' IE5, but all the while there are people using it (quite a lot- remember most people don't visit macrumors and don't upgrade their computers/browsers every 6 months) you can't forget it. If you're a serious web designer you have to build your sites to work across as many platforms as possible, and you can't force people to change just because you can't get your css to work. IE is bad, for designers, but that's our tough luck. I know administrators who still optimise their sites for IE3 and Navigator 4, because if you want to reach the maximum number of people you have to think this way. Look at the stink that was kicked up recently when MS announced they were ceasing support for Windows 98! There are still millions of Win 98/IE4/IE5 users in the world...but ultimately it's all about optimising for your target audience.
 
iMeowbot said:
Oh yeah: the actual fix is to give the body an explicit height:

Code: 
body {
	height:100%;
}

(Just for kicks: this difference isn't a bug either in IE or the other browsers, the standard really does make the size of the initial block implementation-dependent!)
Click to expand...

Just tried it - definite improvement, but still not quite right and seems to have presented other problems...

Edit: Fixed! Made a silly mistake...thanks a million!
 
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