I have tested the below web page in several browsers with no problems, but I don’t have early version of browsers, and some users of the site who have IE 4 are telling me that the page just comes up blank.
Does anyone know of any reason this might happen?
IE 4??? OMG I wouldn’t think anyone would still be using that.
Anyway, I’m guessing that what they’re seeing is not a blank page, but a browser hang during page load. Maybe charset issues?
Try changing the html tag to
<html lang="ko">
and adding the meta tag
<meta http-equiv="Content-language" content="ko">
It also comes up blank when I don’t use electricity so please fix it for me.
I can’t believe that you have many users using IE4 when some major sites are dropping support for IE6 now.
You can find a list of supported CSS properties for ie4 here and just use the ones the work in IE4. If you want to go further back than that then I suggest you use just plain text without styling. In reality you can’t reasonably expect to support browsers that old although I admire you for trying
I also note that the first line of your css file is a BOM (byte order mark) which will break some browsers also. You shouldn’t be saving the BOM there so change your editor settings.
[B][/B]/* CSS for JnY web site */
Those strange characters are the BOM as shown when using edit css in Firefox.
Sorry to be a bit blunt.
I can’t find anything in my editor aboout BOM characters, but I am using utf-8 encoding - could that cause a BOM character to be written? But if I don’t use utf-8 encoding, I have problems with the Korean characters (I changed my editor’s encoding to utf-8 because of this).
To be honest, I was hoping there was a simple, known solution - if it’s not easy to fix, then I certainly don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to support IE4! But I’m worried that in Korea there are a lot of people with old browsers - so far I have encountered three and the site isn’t even launched yet, we’ve only shown it to a handful of potential customers! And I thought they were quite technologically advanced…
then I certainly don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to support IE4! But I’m worried that in Korea there are a lot of people with old browsers
That is a problem with no easy solution I’m afraid.
All you can do is to download IE4 and test for yourself. I doubt anyone on the forums here will have experience with testing in IE4 and would not be prepared to spend the time researching either. I could help with IE5 because that was my original stopping point but I don’t support it anymore.
I can’t find anything in my editor aboout BOM characters
What editor are you using? You can save the css fil as UTF-8 without BOM. In Notepad++.
You can find more information here.
I just discovered a user with IE6 who says it doesn’t work for them either… Of course it’s a Korean version of IE6 - I don’t know if it’s much different.
The editor is called codelobster - it supports HTML, CSS, PHP, JS and XML and I downloaded it basically because it’s free… But it seems to be OK up to now.
Since lord knows what your editor might be adding, try having that content go through a real text editor (the kind that don’t add stuff and do stuff for you). Save as utf-8 but not as “unicode”.
Do you have a copy of IE6 at all to check on?
It should be the same and the page seems to work in my IE6 ok except that you have a “haslayout” problem in the left column navigation.
You need to add the following rules.
#topnavigation,#topnavigation ul{zoom:1.0}
I also notice that you are giving all IE versions a whole new stylesheet!
You should only be giving IE the rules that are changed and not all the rules. Otherwise this is a maintenance nightmare.
You should only be giving the rules to specific IE versions anyway which in most cases would be less than ie7.
<!--[if lt IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ieEnglishstyle.css"/>
<![endif]-->
Go through the IE styles and only use rules that have been changed in someway. I’m guessing that you have just duplicated the whole file anyway:)
I can sympathize with someone being hardware/software handicapped.
Does IE4 support conditional comments?
As for not seeing a “BOM” setting in your editor, some call it “signature”, so if you see a checkbox for that, that’s the culprit. Otherwise you may need a different text editor. After 10+ years of using plain Notepad, I’ve just started to use Notepad++ to deal with some issues I’ve run into working with gettext po/mo files. So far it seems very good and well worth the price (Free!).
No only from ie5 upwards. The code I posted was a fix for IE5/6.
What editor are you using? You can save the css fil as UTF-8 without BOM. In Notepad++.
I made a mistake about my editor - it has two utf-8 encoding choices, one with BOM and one without. I am using the one without BOM. So I don’t understand how the .css file has a BOM character at the front.
Also, I downloaded Notepad++ to look at the file, and even if I have it showing all characters (e.g. it shows CR and LF) I don’t see a BOM character - how can I see it?
Anyway, I have used Notepad++ to save the file without a BOM character and will try it out.
Do you have a copy of IE6 at all to check on?
Yes, my friend in Korea has a copy, so I can get her to test for me.
I also notice that you are giving all IE versions a whole new stylesheet!
Yes, I only discovered yesterday that I don’t need a complete different style sheet. I am still learning! It’s a great handicap sitting by myself in my home office and having no-one to bounce questions and ideas off, so I really value all you people in this forum - without you I’d have got nowhere.
I don’t see a BOM character - how can I see it?
I can sometimes see them (in the form that Paul O’B posted) when I view source, then copy into my text editor (or if I View Source in Konqueror who opens the source in Open Office for some reason). In order to see it, whoever is showing the source has to be unable to understand the character, as then it will show the  instead. Normally it’s not a rendered character.
They show up straight away with Edit CSS in the Firefox webdev toolbar which I use all the time to debug other sites.
I just checked in IE5.5 and it showed perfectly for me, my suggestion may be that they might not have the correct language pack installed so the characters aren’t showing up (an issue with the OS rather than the website itself). I’ve seen websites totally blank out when you don’t have the correct language pack (though you could always try changing the encoding via the right click menu to see if you can get it to load outside that)
Good point. I don’t know anything about how IE4 works. But as the charset is UTF-8 maybe they only have Windows-#### or KUC or something. If they’re Korean visitors they must have some sort of Korean language installed, just not UTF-8
After trying lots of different things, theproblem finally went away when I changed from HTML to XHTML in the DOCTYPE.
Weird, huh?
Anyway, thanks for all the ideas - have learned alot from the research.
Hmm, if that was the solution; it’s possible something akin to a quirks/extra buggy mode was triggered in the fact that IE4 is so antiquated that it cannot read or totally ignores the XHTML doctype text string thus displayed the content.
In fact, this was IE6 - my ‘intuition’ (completely without logical foundation!) is that it was something to do with the way HTML and XHTML interpret my CSS file differently.
If this was IE6 then the problem is 99% likely to be that you were using an incorrect doctype previously (as Robert mentioned above) and you were triggering quirks mode.
The doctype you are using here is triggering standards mode now. If you were using a full html4.01 doctype before then standards mode would still be triggered and the rendering would be the same.
However if you were using a doctype like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
That will trigger quirks mode.
See here for more information on quirks mode triggers.
Thanks for the link - I was indeed using that exact doctype, and now I can understand why some of my layouts changed when I changed the doctype.
It seems there is no difference between XHTML strict and XHTML transitional with respect to quirks vs strict rendering - can you tell me if there’s any reason to use one or the other?