From Tearsofblood

Revision as of 20:54, 20 June 2007

CSS Issues

I did some research on why my CSS was broken on IE. It turns out that the comment before the doctype on the HTML pages generated by the wiki code puts IE6 and 7 (the version I was testing on) into quirks mode. What this means is that when IE reads the page, it decides it's a non-standards compliant page. Since most old non-stantards compliant pages relied on the buggy CSS support of older browsers, it emulates these bugs. In other words, it starts acting like IE5.

This is very bad. IE5's CSS support (and thus the quirks mode) is buggy as hell. I don't mean to sound rude, especially after offering to help out, but I refuse to work around IE5 bugs just to get IE6/7 to work. The version of MediaWiki being run by this site has been altered to insert a comment at the start of the page. A normal MediaWiki (for instance, the one at Wikipedia) server doesn't do this. Whoever made this change broke CSS in IE6/7.

I'm going to attempt to find a work around to force IE into standard mode. If that can't be done, I'll see if I can get in touch with the admins of this site and talk to them about the issue. If neither of these approches work, I don't know what to suggest, other than finding a different wiki hosting service.

-- Levi 03:20, 19 June 2007 (EDT)

Ok, here's the latest on the CSS hacking adgenda. Firtsly, I've made some changes to the code I'm trying to get working. I found a more efficent way to make the changes, so the code I'm trying to get working now is a lot cleaner than the stuff I had up before. (Which got I rolled back once I realized how horribly it broke IE7.) I also added the new background and moved the content block down the page like the current site, rather than at the top like my earlier version.

Secondly, I've found two sources that created the problems I saw in IE. The first was, as I mentioned before, that the site puts IE into quirks mode. However, while working on a mock-up (in standards mode), I found another thing that was causing issues. The site is set up with a stylesheet to correct for IE6 bugs, but applies it to all versions of IE equal to or above 6. This means that it's compensating for things that have been fixed in IE7. Luckily, one line of Javascript, set up to only run on ver 7, can disable the offending stylesheet. I have it currently implimented in my mock-up.

Unfortunatly, I still haven't come up with a way to force IE out of quirks mode. There may be a Javascript hack I can use there to. I've found some reference to a function to put IE into quirks mode, so if I scour the MSDN documentation, perhaps something will turn up. I haven't bothered to bother the admins about it yet. Mainly for two reasons. Firstly, I haven't given up on finding a work around. Secondly, perhaps I'm just a pesimist, but somehow I doubt I'd get a helpful response. After all, if the server's been set up like this for some time, all the other wikis (at least those that bothered with custom CSS) where built to work around the quirks, so changing it would break there stuff.

Dispite the grumpy and frustrated post I made above, if I absolutly have to, I'll see what can be done to get it working, even in quirks mode. However, the sheer amount of crazy non-standard stuff you have to work around is staggering. It's bad enough working around real bugs, working around the emulation of old bugs is obnoxious.

Finally, my mock-up is posted at [1]. It currently renders correctly in IE7, FF2, and FF1.5, the three browsers I have to test with. However, I've made one change that we can't duplicate here by editing Header. I removed the above mentioned comment that causes so much grief. We'll need to find another method.

It doesn't yet impliment all the changes to link colors and header sizes that you've done, but they'll be easy enough to add later. It also dosn't attempt any of the more complicated graphical upgrades you've got planned. I figure there's not point getting fancy untill we can get the basics working. It also fixes the current issues with Firefox regarding the user toolbar and the view tabs.

-- Levi 13:11, 19 June 2007 (EDT)

Levi, you're doing some marvellous things thusfar. However, looking at your mockup with IE6, I'm not entirely sure that things are working perfectly (although it's hard to tell whether or not they're things you already know about). Most notably, the text appears incredably small (changing the browser's text size to "large" makes things look a lot more regular. The width of the actual text content in the main content area, and the entire footer, are both a lot shorter than they should be. The views tabs aren't entirely right in several ways, and the width is much more than 800. I've prepared a screenshot of what I see here.

Again, I don't know if these are issues you're aware of, but I thought it was worth pointing out just in case.

-- Fire Wolf

Well, I don't have IE6 to test on, so I don't know how things are rendering in IE6. I'll have to take a look at the screenshot and try to figure it out, but without a browser to test on, it may be pretty tricky to work out what exactly is going on.

However, I belive I know why it is larger than 800 pixels wide as I just ran into this problem myself (in a way). As I haven't found a way to get IE out of quirks mode without removing the offending comment, I've started to work on making it render correctly in quirks mode.

Using an old hack, I managed to get it centered, but then I ran into another issue. The size of the Google ads at the bottom of the page is larger than will fit into the content area once I scale it down. In FF and standards mode IE7, it simply pokes out into the margin. It doesn't look perfect, but AFAIK there's no easy way to fix this. However, in quirks mode (and apparently IE6, even in standards mode), IE instead expands the size so that it fits. I haven't looked into a work around for this yet, but it's the next item on my adgenda.

I also have some ideas as to what may be causing the other problems. I'll look into fixing them as well. I should have a new version of the mockup posted some time soon, this time in quirks mode. Which means, if it all works, that we can actually use the results.

P.S. If you sign your comments with four tildes (~), it'll expand out into the username and time, like I've been doing. However, the "--" part you have to add yourself.

-- Levi 16:54, 20 June 2007 (EDT)