General Hacks

[Guido]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to making websites, I started about six months ago. Soon came acrross CMSMS and now a have a pretty descent site. One thing that's been driving me crazy:

When I make changes to my site I usually check it with IE8, FireFox and Google Chrome. Once everything is in place, I sometimes check it on someone else's PC that may have IE6 or 7. Most of the time I find something wrong. A horizontal rule that suddenly has a lot of white space or is lined up in the middle instead of on the left. Or maybe a news summary where all the floats have gone berserk. I tried to keep all the default Hacks in the templates and stylesheets intact, but some are missing.

Is there some kind of list of things that you should be aware of when making CSS? I mean things that work out diffently for IE8 than 7. Or general hacks that solve things for IE6.

Also, I suppose the dropdown menu template that I use is useless in IE6 because it won't work. So I made pages for the top-level list items where people can still find the deeper pages. I'm don't really care that much about IE6 though because I don't think that may people still use it, but if there's a few hacks I can use I would.

[replytomk3]

There are websites out there that allow you to view your site in many different browsers at the same time, even with different resolutions.

[RonnyK]

Guido,

the default installation comes with some templates, that already have hacks inside for different browsers. F.e. there is a CSS dropdown available, with a specific IE6 call to the js-script, as the other browsers dont need it...

Ronny

[Mantlet]

Hey Guido,

Whether you can deny the IE6 users depends on your audience. The amount of IE6 users is shrinking. Most IE6 users are office users that can't upgrade themselves or need 6 for some legacy functions.

I agree it is hard to make it compatible for all these browsers. From 7 and up you should do OK. One thing to know is that IE6 doens't support CSS float properly. Also positioning can give you a headache.

Usually I just punch it into Google, because CSS is not just CMSMS related. It just gives way more results than this humble forum

[Deak]

Guido,

If you're serious about building a cross-browser template from scratch, you could do a lot worse than get familiar with using a CSS reset. These are base stylesheets that zero everything across all browsers.

I like Yahoo's the best:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

Eric Meyer's is nice too:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/ ... -reloaded/