IE wider than opera and firefox

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dotancohen
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IE wider than opera and firefox

Post by dotancohen »

I'm pretty much a CSS newbie, so please bear with me. I just switched (most) of my font tags to CSS, and now IE gives me a huge font that makes my pages too wide for a 800 or ever 1024 width screen. Could someone take a peak at the source code of http://lyricslist.com and see why IE makes the letters so big? Opera and Firefox are making the page nice, from what I can see. If anyone can confirm that it looks good in Firefox, Safari (I don't have access to a mac) and Opera, I would appreciate it.

Dotan Cohen
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Skittlewidth
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Post by Skittlewidth »

I'm guessing you haven't put a doctype at the top of your pages.

stick this at tht top of your page and see if it sorts it out :)

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!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">
(Thats for xhtml transitional)
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

looks largely the same in Firefox 1.0.6 and IE 6.0.2900 SP2 for me..

Since you are using "small" the actual size is entirely dependant on the browser choosing what's "small".. which IE may base that on your OS settings for fonts, while Firefox probably doesn't...
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Skittlewidth
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Post by Skittlewidth »

Yeah I didn't see a difference either. (Posted before I looked at the page - stupid me)
dotancohen
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Post by dotancohen »

Yes, there most certainly is a doctype. I'm far from a professional, but I do try as best that I can to use good practices (not only on the internet).

As I use Fedora at home, I only saw it on IE on the university computers. Everything else looks good on those machines, other than my site!

Does nobody get a horizontal scroll bar? If so, then all is well. Thanks.

Dotan
Roja
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Post by Roja »

dotancohen wrote:Yes, there most certainly is a doctype. I'm far from a professional, but I do try as best that I can to use good practices (not only on the internet).
Don't get to say this often enough.. Good for you! (And good for everyone else as a result!)
dotancohen wrote:Does nobody get a horizontal scroll bar? If so, then all is well. Thanks.
Nope. It may be a resolution issue. Maybe at lower resolutions (smaller monitor), it does so.
dotancohen
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Post by dotancohen »

It was on a 1024 width 17 inch monitor, in XP. I was just informed that it the 'wideness' occurs only in IE 5.5 (I run linux at home, so I rely on input from friends, though I saw this myself at the university). Is there a way to tell IE 5.5 only to do smaller fonts?

If anyone can confirm this 5.5-specific behaviour, I would appreciate it. Thanks, guys!

Dotan Cohen
http://IE-only.com
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nielsene
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Post by nielsene »

That's probably the box model flaw in MSIE (width not including padding/margin). You can try some of the various hacks to change a width to a lower value for MSIE's using either the * hack or the voice hack, etc
dotancohen
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Post by dotancohen »

You know what? I may have just developed a bad attitude, but I'll just leave it the way it is and add a link to download Firefox. I'm happy that I am doing my best to create a standards-compliant site. If user chooses to use a non-standards compliant browser, well, then let them have that horizontal scrollbar! I know that not everyone in the world can upgrade. But I think that there are more people that CAN upgrade (but have little reason too, as webmasters are bending over backwards to code for their broken browser) than that can't. And maximum, they have a horizontal scrollbar, that's all.

Is this the wrong attitude to take? Maybe if more webmasters took this attitude then people would stop using broken browsers.
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nielsene
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Post by nielsene »

Well I feel that way about NS4 series browsers, and did 2-3 years ago. I'm not ready to give up on MSIE 5 yet. Its still rather prevalent on older Macs and PCs.
dotancohen
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Post by dotancohen »

According to the logs, IE 5.x makes up about 5% of my visitors. If I 'fix' the site, then I am only giving myself a headache, and giving them another excuse not to switch to a standards-compliant browser. Maybe not everyone can upgrade, but I added this text to the homepage:
The designers of LyricsList recommend the use of standards-compliant web browsers, such as FireFox. This ensures that you see the page as the designers intended it. Thank you and enjoy the site!

I don't know that everyone will read it, but I think that there are two solutions to the problem:
1) Webmasters can kill themselves coding in non-standard code and 'tricks' for noncompliant browsers
2) Webmasters can write compliant code, and the users of non-comliant browsers who want to view the web will switch to compliant browsers.

I know that not everyone can upgrade, either for lack of money (downloading 2 megs), or knowedge. I know that firefox runs on WIn95/98, mac, and linux (I use linux at home), and have seen it on a 233 mHz Slackware machine, so I don't think that hardware is an issue.

Let them get as frustrated with IE as I am! Or better yet, them them be frustrated with it instead of me!

Thanks for letting me rant...

Dotan Cohen
http://IE-only.com
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