CSS and the Wrath of Internet Explorer

Submitted on Jun 14, 2008, 6:09 a.m.

I have a lot of respect for experienced CSS/XHTML designers having lived through two medium size projects that both had accessibility  and XHTML  Strict requirements - it was tough going. We survived the Peekaboo Bug , the Guillotine Bug , and the Duplicate Characters Bug  to name a few.

I recently updated the design of my blog and my photo gallery component . Trying to keep the site IE6 compatible brought back painful memories. Thanks to this kind blogger at 456 Berea St  - I managed to squash the last CSS bug in the layout - a problem I was having with space appearing between <li> items in a list that contains block level elements.  I was kind of surprised to see this in IE7. The block element in this case was an <a> tag - and needed to have a width or height set in order to close up the gap between the containing <li>s; a very common layout for creating hover effects on menu items in <ul> lists. Sigh.

Lone blogger 1 - IE6/IE70