Looks good in IE7, hopeless in IE6

[JillC]

I have a site with a fixed left div holding the nav bar and a scrolling right div for the content. When I added in the code to use fckeditor as the CMS I found that the left div overlapped the editor and it was not possible to save or publish any changes to the page. Eventually I figured that if I changed the left div to position:relative instead of absolute, that the editor header showed properly. The right side was dropped down to below the last line in the left div, but I figured my end-user would cope with that.

Then I found that this wonky display is also how it shows up in IE6. So I tried putting position:absolute inside an <!--[if IE 6]> but that doesn't seem to do anything.

Where have I gone wrong?

[all4nerds]

Hello

Don't sound to good position relative absolute, anyway without code or better, a link to the problem page, we can't help you

[JillC]

Sorry, realised I should have put the code as soon as I hit the Go.

Have a look at http://www.streetside.com.au

Thanks.

[all4nerds]

Hello

Seems to work nice in IE 6 only needs a small haslayout fix on the li ?

/**************** IE fixes ****************/

html
{overflow:hidden;}

body
{height:100&#37;; width:100%; overflow:auto;}

#sidebar
{position:absolute;}

#nav li{height:1%;}

[JillC]

oh well, I still can't work it out. In order to check this, I am using the Backward Compatability Viewer from delorie.com and telling it to look at MSIE 6.0 - this change you have suggested doesn't appear to make any difference. Is this site just unreliable?

[all4nerds]

Hello

I am looking at at the live page now in IE 6 on XP pro, looks and works OK for me, if there are minor differences, You have to point me to them , maybe it needs further haslayout debugging for IE 6

free IE tester
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

for free, more Browser, but takes some time
http://browsershots.org/

[JillC]

Thanks for that site - certainly much much easier than delorie. The browsershots.org site never works for me - it just takes too many hours.

It shows up properly in IE 6 but not IE 5.5 - that's what it looks like in the delorie site when it's supposed to be showing me the IE 6 version.

I will have to wait till tomorrow now to see if the person who was having trouble with the site can see it properly.

Now, I don't understand WHY #nav li{height:1&#37;;} would have made any difference. These fiddly bits always seem to catch me out.

[all4nerds]

Hello

For haslayout see FAQ CSS on top of this forum

IE 5 5.5 probably need box model debugging. width's + padding + margin + borders, also see FAQ CSS forum

[JillC]

All the people who were telling me they couldn't view the site properly now say it's fixed, so I'll call it a day and not bother trying to get it to work in IE 5.
Thanks for your help. I posed this question on 3 different forums and got 3 totally different answers. But yours was the solution which worked. Keep up the good work.

[drhowarddrfine]

Some of your markup is invalid. Didn't check css.
You should not be using xhtml version 1.1.