indescribable
stormbadgerThere were a few flakes of snow falling at lunch time. Sign of weather to come?
While browsing some websites on CSS and experimenting a bit, I found that the IE6 auto margin problem went away once I set the correct DOCTYPE. Apparently, IE now has two rendering modes. Depending on what it sees or doesn't see as the DOCTYPE, it will either render the CSS the old broken way or as correctly as it can. This is pretty bizarre stuff but I suppose it makes sense. Websites that rely on buggy IE behavior can continue to rely on buggy IE behavior well into the future, while websites written to W3C standards can set the DOCTYPE and work fine with newer versions of IE. However, I think keeping the broken handling of auto margins is a bit much. Is there any website out there that depends on IE ignoring
margin: 0 auto;?After dealing with that, I hit another IE problem, this time with absolute positioning. This one didn't go away when I added the DOCTYPE so I assume Microsoft is still working on it somehow? I used the workaround described here and now everything looks more or less the same in Phoenix and IE6, and passes the W3C CSS Validator. And so I'm happy, at least until the next CSS rendering problem. Weren't we supposed to leave the bad old days of continual tweaking and working around behind when we moved to CSS? I guess it wouldn't be any fun otherwise. :)
I also updated to the 2/24/2003 nightly build of Phoenix. The new Options dialog looks pretty slick but they seem to have broken the New Tab command. You win some, you lose some.