Customer Street CSS

Long has it been a problem for developers developing sites for browsers that do not support standards in their HTML and CSS. Creating a site that is accessible, clean and well coded is a problem with this respect because of the fact that some browser bugs can only be gotten round by either using ‘hacks’, or by creating a lot of excess code that really shouldn’t need to be there. But that is the crisis the developers face everyday.

Here at Customer Street we like to do things right. In CSS terms this means building nice that work across all browsers and generally look the way the customer, or the company planned. However, if you are not a web developer you may not know that getting things to look right for Internet Explorer is a nightmare. This is because the browser does not recognise a lot of the proprietary styles that are in the Web Standard Definitions, and so we are forced to either changed our styles or find other hacks and tricks to get around the rendering issues.

For a long time, since I started taking a very active interest in Web Standards and learning CSS I have always queried the methods by which forms, such as contact forms, should be correctly marked up and displayed. Since I can remember building my first web site, there have been disagreements as to the correct semantic approach to mark-up when it comes to forms of all types.

Affects Browsers: IE 5.01 to IE 6

If you’ve ever had problems positioning floated elements in IE (Which you probably have because it’s IE) then it could be
because your margins are being doubled. IE doubles the widths of any left and right margins applied to a floated
element. As far as i’m aware this has been the case since at least version 5.01.

Before IE7 came along the solution to this was simply to add an extra hacked line into your stylesheet and halve the
offending margin accordingly
div.block {
width:100px;
height:150px;
float:left;
margin-right:10px;
/margin-right:5px;
}
This would escape the first character of the line margin right making the line look like garbage in all browsers except IE
which will just ignore the escaped character and accept the new margin-right command overwriting the first.