A recent example of a debugging episode with IE6 -
We recently discovered that a form on a certain website had mysteriously stopped working in IE7 and Firefox (2 or 3, I don’t know which version) on a PC. More specifically, something was preventing the user from clicking on the form fields and links on the page. After re-creating the issue in IE7, and finding that certain links to the far right of the page were still clickable (as if an invisible box was hovering over most of the page), I started commenting out some CSS code, and found the issue was with some PNGs I was trying to force IE6 to see as transparent using the alpha channel filter fix hack.
This fix usually works well on background images (if you’re not putting a link on top of them – links don’t work) however, if you use a form on the same page, it will interfere with the way the form works – i.e. – prevent the user from entering information into the form fields – in essence, the form doesn’t work. There is a fix (see #8 in a list on the page linked above), but instead I decided to just re-engineer the page and not use the alpha channel filter fix hack at all.
Just another reason why IE6 users should at least upgrade to IE7, and ideally just move to the more secure, standards-compliant Firefox browser – the ways in which IE6 limits the progress of the web are numerous.
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3 Comments
Try putting your IE6 styles in a separate stylesheet and using conditional comments to only serve those styles to IE6. That way you won’t have nonstandard css in the files you serve to the good browsers.
— import style sheet
Also, you can fix the links by making them position: relative for ie6. or use superslight (http://24ways.org/2007/supersleight-transparent-png-in-ie6) and make js do the work for you. Although with the js solution, you should provide a backup in case js is turned off.
doh. Blog stripped out the HTML in my conditional comment example.
Fabulous suggestions – I’ve been using a separate IE stylesheet and conditional comments like you suggest for awhile now (can’t remember when I started doing that – probably around the time I started using the latest version of Blueprint CSS).
And thanks for the link to the Supersleight fix – I’ll definitely check that out. I’ve been using IE7-js on a few recent projects, and it seems to get the job done, but of course it’s a js solution – so I’m still holding out for IE6 to just die a horrible nasty death – soon, hopefully (been saying that for a couple of years though). :)