ij_siteschemes
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IJ_siteschemes is where everyone involved in designing site schemes for IJ can exchange notes, documents and ideas. Membership is currently moderated, so please leave a comment for branchandroot if you'd like to join in.

September 2015
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Branch [userpic]
Problems with IE6; help needed in testing

Okay, it looks like IE6 is throwing a real fit about the new layouts. See the very helpful screenshots in this comment.

I've given IJ-sitepage-body a width, so it should have layout and IJ-sitepage-nav should accept absolute positioning within it; apparently the problem is something more arcane.

If anyone has a copy of IE6 in easy reach and wants to poke at the problem, I'd hugely appreciate the help. The only copy I can get to is remote and I can't connect to anything /else/ while using it, which makes testing changes a bit of a trial.

Any ideas are welcome!

ETA: Height of the header is part of it; this... is going to be a pain. I might actually need to add a clearing div to the html code. More news as I can catch it.

ETA2: Triumph! Maybe. I think I've gotten it to play nicely with older IE, but if anyone has a copy of IE5 or 6 hanging around and could give it a test-drive once the code is live, that would be very helpful.

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I have every copy of IE you can imagine thanks to Multiple IEs (free to download/use). How far back do you want to test? Do you want the Multiple IEs program so you can see the layouts yourself? Or I can just look at/screencap the layouts for you...if help is no longer needed let me know...

Oh, lovely! If you could just take a quick look at a sidebar version in IE5 and IE6, and make sure that the menu is all the way over on the left, and the header doesn't have the frequently-used-links floating up at the top or anything weird like that, that would be extremely helpful. Thank you!

You've got a lot of problems with the new Work Theme - sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Has anyone else mentioned yet that...guess not.

I have plenty of screenshots, how about I upload to PB and put the links here and you can go over them one by one when you have time?

Biggest problem is sidebar - your forgot to close an URL somewhere and in IE entire blocks of the sidebar are now huge clickable green boxes. You have to see the screenshots to get an idea....most annoying part is when you hover over said "boxes" they flash dozens of times a second. Like strobe lights. It could give you vertigo.

Second biggest problem is out-of-place gray color blocks that were not removed or changed to new color, and sidebar blocks of color willy-nilly instead of sidebar displaying all-cream or all-tan. This is just testing in Work Theme, BTW...haven't looked at other themes yet, but I can if you need me to. I'll upload relevant screenshots to next comment in a few minutes. Sorry I can't work any faster here.

Tested in IE 6, btw.

*nods* The whole-section highlighting I knew about; that was one too few uls in the css string. It'll be fixed with the next code upload, probably tomorrow morning when Squeaky is back on. *shrugs* This whole thing is really in /alpha/ testing, not beta, so I'm not surprised there are still problems.

If you could up some screenshots of the gray boxes, though, please; that's not one I think I've found.

My Photobucket album for Anti-AOL is public. Here's the link for it:

http://s127.photobucket.com/albums/p149/marahmarie/

All screencaps for you are on page 1 of that account (funny how that worked out). Res is 1024 x 768.

Do you want me to check this theme in IE5 too? (It may break in IE5, I haven't looked yet. Personally I would fix it for IE6 first, then worry about 5 later).

Do you want me to test the other new schemes for you?

Thank you!

*examines pics and deletes many expletives* I /knew/ it was going to screw up the absolute positioning! *chews lip* Okay. I think we can fix that, at least, though it'll take some screwing with the core code.

*frowns* The gaps in the header, though, I'll have to poke at for a while.

And, yeah, if 6 is like this, I expect 5 is too.

If you could take a look at the dropdowns in 6, that would be lovely! I just need to know if the header problems are showing up there, too. I expect so, but best to be sure.

Drop down just for this theme? I'll test the other themes too if you like, unless the base code is all pretty much the same. grab me while you can, I have absolutely nothing else to do tonight.

*nods* Just this theme will be okay; the base code is all the same, just different colors.

I added 5 more pictures for the dropdown version. They're the 5 most recent ones on page 1 top.

Key points: grey box on login, MY IJ and comment settings pages, some tan colorblocks in sidebar (not sure if you want sidebars all tan or all creme so I don't know where to go with that), when you hover over user icon on any logged in pages, tan background pops up and does not disappear after moving mouse away. All pages once logged in have something dippy going on in top middle bar with alternating white/tan blocks of color (looks like table might be incorrectly assembled as well- but just my guess).

If I didn't screencap any page you think you might still need to see I either already checked it and it was OK or else I forgot, so let me know if there's any more pages you want to look at.

I wish it was illegal to use any version of IE below 7. As in go to court pay a fine illegal. It's just so aggravating!

oh, I forgot to mention one other thing - on the dropdowns themselves the dark green is not stretching across the entire space for the links (it's stopping short, with a white block next to the green block at the end of the link). I think that's on the album too somewhere in the last 5 pics I uploaded - edit, no it's not, so I'll upload one more pic in a second. I'm not sure if you want the dropdown links that way or if that's something you want to fix as well.

*feelingly* You and me both!

Thank you for checking on all these, this helps a lot. Some of it the next code update should catch, and I'm hoping that going back to a floated sidebar will fix more. If I'm lucky, giving the bloody header a height will take care of that weirditude. *crosses fingers* Looks like I'll have to add in some different link widths, in the dropdown, for old versions, too. At least it's all doable!

Thanks again!

You're welcome...ready for screencaps using IE 5.5? It's not breaking in 5.5, quite the opposite: it's overflowing. Tables and text are running right off the right-hand side of the page (and no scrollbar to make up for it). Believe it or not, the dropdown links display the green background correctly in 5.5 so that may be something to consider when you recode. I haven't tested IJ in 5.01 yet, but I have the feeling it will break, and I'm not sure if you and [info]squeaky want to just let it break or if you both want to do smething about it if it does. My blog on IJ breaks in 5.01 (not in 5.5, though the way it looks in 5.5 is perfectly hideous).

Just as a rough guide for you guys (since I know IJ wants to stay competitive) all of LJ's pages work back to version 4.0 of IE, but LJ has a lot more coders and money than IJ does, so it's all relative - I'm sure.

Shoot, one edit on the above...there is a scrollbar in 5.5 for the pages, but the pages scroll for about another foot (no kidding) and most of it is empty white space once you scroll past the end of the tables/text.

OK, I got that wrong, too - there's more like 5-6 feet of empty white space on some pages in 5.5, I scrolled so fast before I didn't catch that. If you want the 5.5 screencaps let me know (they're done, just haven't uploaded them).

*headdesk* Well, at least now I know why LJ floats the content divs. I'll try that and see if it works.

I would like to have this be compatible back to 5, but at this point I figure 4 and Navigator can both go hang.

There's no reason to let Navigator "go hang", seriously. Navigator and Firefox are pretty much the same thing these days - but AOL stopped "support" for Netscape this month (there will be no more code updates or new versions of it...but it's still available for download).

You can use the same plugins for Netscape that you use for Firefox (pretty much all of them, I think) and you can skin it with the same themes, if I recall correctly.

I have a copy of Netscape (v.9.5, I think) and I like it. While I wouldn't muck around with backwards testing for older versions of Netscape, the more recent versions are just Firefox all over again, (or is that vice versa?) so you don't have to worry if the style sheets are already correctly displaying in FF (and it looks like they are) - they will look just fine in more recent versions of Netscape as well.

I'll upload the 5.5 shots shortly....do you want 5.01, too? I haven't captured the pages in that version yet - just 5.5, so let me know.

Ah, well that's good, then. The more compatibility the better.

And yeah, if you could hit 5.01, that would be lovely, thank you!

I think one of you is going to have to install Multiple IE's and finish this up yourselves, I'm sorry - I'm at my friend's house using her dialup (I just realized it's dialup when I visited Photobucket, and she doesn't have a faster connection). I'm using some program she's got to connect to my computer and grab the 2 screens I took last night - one's IE 5.5, one's IE 5.01. The pics are labeled accordingly and should be uploaded...soon, hopefully...

5.5 has a huge scrollbar problem, too much white space on the right, you might want to look at that...5.01 is looking bad all-around, everything is misaligned. I'm going to be working the rest of the weekend so I won't have much more time to jump in on this, either, sorry. Good luck to all of you - I can't wait to see how it turns out, so keep up the great work, surely we all appreciate it.. :-)

One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

I have poor eyesight, so I normally keep the fonts at the Largest setting. I took a few screenshots with different font sizes here.

1. Normal font size (medium)

2. Largest font size

When I scroll down and then scroll back up, the color of the header is fixed, so the white you see may just be a quirk of my system.

If you can figure out a way to get browsershots.org to work with the site scheme selection, it would make testing easier, I would think. I can only get it to pull up the default site scheme right now. :-(

Hmm, when I run worksafe.css thru the syntax compatibility checker (both IE5.5 & IE6) in Free CSS Toolbox, I get a Parsing error: too many semicolons found on line 9 hr { margin: 1em 100px;; }. When I run it thru Topstyle Lite's style inspector (set to IE6), what comes up red is !important, max-width, _width, _margin-top, _margin-right, _height, max-height, border-spacing, and opacity. Have no idea if that will help you as I stopped coding webpages at the end of the '90s, so I know approximately nothing about CSS.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

Hee! The !importants are firefox only and the _s are IE hacks so that IE won't read something :D

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

*^__^*

I'M SO OLD OMG. I remember when HTML 4 came out and everyone was so! excited! about the idea of both Netscape and IE actually following standards; ten+ years later and they're both still driving people crazy. *shakes head* I'm so glad I got out of all this when I did - TOO MUCH DRAMA.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

It's not just that it's too much drama, it's too much of a PITA. The drama really starts when you start ripping your hair out coding for all the different versions of IE, followed by cursing, foaming at the mouth, shaking your fist in the air symbolically at Bill Gates/MS, promising him revenge via ope-source browsers like he's never seen before...the reactions get a lot more dramatic than the coding itself, which is just a monotonous PITA, mostly because you have to pull the answers out of thin air after all the standard hacks and workarounds just don't work.

I can go through like 20 different hacks coded 10 different ways just to fix one messed-up element in one stylesheet, and don't think that doesn't take me hours to arrive at that *one* answer, because sometimes it does. CSS is not for the impatient or the person who thinks he/she knows everything there is to know about IE, because IE will always throw you for another loop just when you least expect it, and that element of coding for it never ends.

As I mentioned in this comment above, Netscape is really not that bad, trust me. Same engine as Firefox (Gecko) same CSS handling (at least these days)...just not that bad at all.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

Netscape is really not that bad, trust me. Same engine as Firefox (Gecko)

Hee. I was talking about the mid-'90s, when FF wasn't even a twinkle in the mind's eye of it's creator. When NN first came on the scene, and throughout the time when it dominated the browser wars, it was famous (or infamous, depending on who you talked to) for implementing non-standard HTML extensions and generally not giving a crap about standards compliance. This was awesome at the beginning (and led to all sorts of innovation, and gave us much of the HTML & Javascript standards we see today), cos everyone just designed for NN and said "Fuck it!" to IE. But as the decade wore on it got to be frustrating, and the bugs in the program weren't being fixed, and why should people be stuck using just one browser anyway? I bowed out around the end of '98 and I'm glad of it. Of course, this means I'm basically useless here (as after a decade of non-use I've forgotten nearly everything I knew) but I can't help but find it amusing that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

The origin of non-standard "blink": http://www.w3.org/Style/HTML40-plus-blink.dtd

Seen first in Netscape. Not even supported in IE. That little jog through Netscape's history was an eye-opener - thanks.

Funny how the more things change, though, the more they change; now Netscape gets few complaints from anyone who's familiar with more recent versions, while IE gets nothing but contempt for being the only non-standards compliant browser, not to mention MS achieving their stanglehold on the market through monopolistic prctices such as forced and irreversible browser/OS intergration.

Just thought I'd point that out :)

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

True. ^_^

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

"_" for an IE hack? Never saw that one before - honest. I know enough about CSS to fill up my right pinky, granted, but I know the basic IE hacks...or, I thought I did...that hack is news to me.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

http://cavemonkey50.com/2005/12/the-ultimate-ie-hack-guide/

:)

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

One of the few advantages of any Windows computer is the ability to use Multiple IE, which gives you all versions of IE going back to v.3.0. If you folks want IJ to be fully backward compatible to IE 4.0 (like LJ is), you need to test the CSS; this is the best way that I know how (download link with instructions follows - it installs from an executable that's easy as pie, then just click the icon for the version you want to use to open it - it's pretty straightforward).

Only two problems, both which I think are well-worth it if you need this IE extension to test a lot of code...

1) I think Multiple IE uninstalls IE 7 Pro on every IE 7 restart, which is a PITA, because when I use IE I want the Pro hacks in place. Now I have to reinstall IE 7 Pro every time I want to use it with IE 7 again.

2) Sometimes one of the versions of Multiple IE will crash. I think the cleaner and more up-to-date your PC is, the less that will happen.

Download Multiple IE (it's free) and instructions:

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

From what I understand, the desire to be compatible with 5 and 6 is the impetus behind [info]branchandroot's latest update

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

"If you folks want IJ to be fully backward compatible to IE 4.0 (like LJ is),"

[info]branchandroot has indicated a strong desire to let IE 4 "go hang". I feel otherwise, but I don't know how to test the CSS for you guys, or I would help you with that part of this project, too.

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

*nibbles nail* Maybe it I give the title/logo a percentage width... I'm trying to make this compatible with both large font sizes and an 800x600 screen, which should be interesting. *grins*

Re: One of the few advantages of having a decade-old computer is a copy of IE6

I'm trying to make this compatible with both large font sizes and an 800x600 screen

As a person with limited vision, can I just tell you how thankful I am for that? I absolutely hate it when I have to use a magnifying program just to read the itty-bitty text on some webpages (who the hell defines font sizes in PIXELS ffs!). It's infinitely easier to just set my monitor to 800x600 and use the No Squint extension for FF to up the font size. I don't really care about a little horizontal scrolling, as long as I can still see 80-90% of what's there, you know?

Okay, I finally got a header BG for you for a color version. It's sized at 150, but that won't affect the size of the header when used as a BG element. Just use repeat-x and it will make a lovely blue gradient across.

http://img107.mytextgraphics.com/photolava/2008/01/25/headerblue-49amfld33.gif

Ah, excellent, thank you!

Hi, I'm back. I can't do too many pic uploads with my friend's lousy dialup because it just takes too long (like I said somewhere above) but I was about to close her browser when I noticed a few quirks in IE 7 too (she uses IE 7, I don't, so this was a first for me). I made screencaps/will upload them in shortly.

Main points: the sidebar link hover background color is overflowing the right margin, the sidebar itself needs to be a least a few pixels wider because text is overflowing it too, there is entire page of white space on the update.bml page before you get to the actual HTML text editor box, (the "make a new post" page), there probably doesn't need to be a full page of white space on the View Options update "Success!" page, but maybe I'm being too picky, and this connection is so slow I don't have time to trawl through much more than that because I have to get up early. You guys have IE 7, I'm sure, so shouldn't be much of a problem from here...good luck again.