CSS Problems with IE6

Question

I'm building this site http://www.philgoulet.com/dev/michele/index.php and it looks good in firefox, chrome, IE8, but apparently it looks like death in IE6. Normally I expect everything to look a little different in IE6, but not this bad. I'm not even sure why it's getting so messed up. Anyway, I need to get the site to work in IE6, but the problem is I don't even have IE6 to test it or see what it really looks like. I've just seen screen shots. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have you tried IE NetRenderer?

It allows you to put in a URL and almost instantly see what it would look like in various versions of IE. (Including IE 6.)

Answer 2

Try declaring a doctype for the page in order to force IE6 into standards-compliant mode.

Also, you might want to validate the page. You've got plenty of duplicated IDs.

Answer 3

Internet Explorer 6 can have very different results depending on the method used to construct your page. There are a few notable differences that are well documented on the web that explain different techniques to solve these issues.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/internet-explorer.shtml http://www.virtuosimedia.com/tutorials/ultimate-ie6-cheatsheet-how-to-fix-25-internet-explorer-6-bugs http://websitetips.com/css/solutions/

There are a few packages around that allow you to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the one machine which makes testing and developing a bit easier.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

A side note on my thoughts, if you are required to develop for these older browsers it is worth noting that certain sources have the population of users that access sites with IE6 is around 12 - 15%. Which should be considered when costing a job and how much time should be spent dealing with this portion of the market - versus having an 'Update your browser' box.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200906-201007

I've checked the site out and it's not too bad, I'd say 3 - 4 css fixes and you will be most the way there.

good luck.

Answer 4

Thanks a lot for the help. I also was told that part of the problem is that IE6 does not support .png files, which is what almost every picture is except for the tiled background image. Is that true, and if so, why do some png's show up while others don't?