how do you start to finish to solve IE6 issues, if site is working fine in other browsers?

Question

If you receive a site which is working fine on all browser except IE6 (We can't rebuild the whole site's mark-up). and in IE6 layout is very disturbed.

and only IE6 supported CSS selector is being used in site.

then how do you start to finish to solve IE6 issues? what efforts do you make and how?

• 1st thing is to add IE6 only CSS

   <!--[if IE 6]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie6.css" />   
  

• 2nd thing is to Install (if not already installed) IE tester or VPC image+ MS Virtual PC

Now how do you analyze and solve all CSS issues? without making much changes in HTML code.

remember ,site is working fine on all browser even in IE7 and IE8 and FF.

Answer 1

For IE6, I would include looking at 'having layout' as a step in the debugging proces (eg with firebug)

Answer 2

Use the developer toolbar. The IE VPC image should have this pre-installed into its IE6.

Open the site, see where the problem(s) is found, and play with it using the developer toolbar to find something that works (since you can see the changes in real-time, this allows you to get a good idea about what you really need to do).

Add the fix to your ie6.css file, then rinse and repeat until you reach a satisfactory point.

This, by the way, is my general approach when I experience something unexpected: I use the developer tools and make informed guesses to see how I can make it work as intended, then either add it to an IE-specific stylesheet, or (if it makes sense and doesn't break something else) change the default stylesheet accordingly.

Worst case scenario: you can tell everyone BUT IE6 to load the regular stylesheet (use a downlevel-revealed conditional comment), and provide a horribly dumbed down CSS for that one. That's not really a very pretty solution, but it is a possibility.

Answer 3

best bet is to see what is most out of place, see why its out of place (eg padding, margin, z-index, has-layout) and start fixing them one by one, the more generalized your fixes (eg input instead of input#id ) the quicker this process will go.

Answer 4

I'd start here,

http://www.virtuosimedia.com/tutorials/ultimate-ie6-cheatsheet-how-to-fix-25-internet-explorer-6-bugs

Then I would look at using a jQuery framework to correct the ie6 browser bugs by fixing the browser, rather than changing the code.

Something like, http://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/ http://devsnippets.com/article/reviews/15-jquery-plugins-to-fix-and-beautify-browser-issues.html

Hopefully some other people have more programming answers, but I prefer to use fixes, as it is legacy technology :)