Why Your Web Pages Break in IE7 and How to Fix Them ....

[BellisimaJ.]

We had taken Microsoft seriously when they warned of inconsistencies in page rendering between IE6 and IE7. Even more so when they announced their intention to distribute IE7 as a “high priority” automatic update (thereby ensuring that the millions of existing IE6 users would adopt the new browser en mass).We’d therefore downloaded the various public betas and had thoroughly tested the sites that we’d built and maintained. Yet we hadn’t unearthed any major problems. At least, nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a few tweaks.

“Maybe we’ve missed something,” we thought. So we spoke to our clients again, finding that many had been approached by design agencies prophesising doom and recommending costly redesign programmes to ensure that their sites would be “IE7-ready™”. At about this time, reports from certain quarters of the media began to surface making similar claims of impending disaster. These articles often likened the automatic update process to Microsoft flicking a switch and bringing down the whole ruddy interweb in one fell swoop.

By contrast, those sites that have gone some way towards implementing web standards – like the Alliance and Leicester, for example – are usually in need of a little attention. These sites usually employ (relatively) clean markup, make extensive use of the CSS2 spec and implement certain hacks and filters to support different browsers. They also typically feature a well-formed DOCTYPE. These attempts at standards-compliance throw IE7 into strict mode – a mode that has seen significant upgrades in order to meet W3C specs and is therefore quite different to IE6’s equivalent. As a result, the presentation of these sites in the two browsers can be quite different. In part two next week we’ll be looking at the reasons why.

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/des...-you-ready

[BellisimaJ.]

Before we get into the issues that plagued the sites in our study, let’s quickly take a look at one that didn’t. “Why bother?” you might say. Well, if your site’s breaking in IE7, then this is the first problem you should attempt to rule out.

Put simply, if you’re using JavaScript or server-side logic to serve different styles to different browsers, you need to make sure that you’re not inadvertently excluding IE7.

How might you be excluding IE7? Well, perhaps you’ve written a script that applies one set of styles when your pages are viewed in IE6 and another set of styles when they’re viewed in all preceding versions of IE. This would have worked nicely in the past, but now that IE7 has arrived it will cause you problems. Why? Because while you’ve specified what would happen in IE6 and earlier, you’ve forgotten to specify what would happen in later versions of IE - later versions like IE7.

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/des...ll-the-ie7