Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
When you say all versions of Internet Explorer, are you sure you’re not just viewing it in something like quirks mode? Press F12 to check this. What are the ‘Browser mode’ and ‘Document mode’ options set at?
I’m gonna have to thank you profusely for this answer. I did indeed have my IE browser set to “quirks” mode, though I honestly know nothing about it, and when I changed over everything came up correctly. I was disconcerted, though, to see the same bizarre display variations when checking the site in netrenderer.com, as well as on a lab computer yesterday — all the same issues were present.
Am I to assume all those computers / renderers were set to quirks mode and thus rendering incorrectly? And what does that mean for the average IE user? Without messing with their settings, are they seeing the site as I intended, or is quirks mode something that comes up by default?
FYI, I’m a mac user, so IE testing involves either pulling out an old macbook running vmware, or using netrenderer. Not very familiar with how IE is set up for most people.
Thanks again, Andrew.
-JM
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
Quirks mode is the equivalent of IE5.5 where Internet Explorer tried to make up its own rules on how to handle CSS.
I can’t tell why you experienced this issue across other machines, could you replicate it, screen shot it and note down the versions the issues occur in? So that we can check it out.
You need to check something like Google Analytics to see what is the most common IE version people are using on your site to get as close as you can to knowing the average IE user. Then try out your site in that browser version.
If average Joe really is using quirks mode in IE then I’m confident that he won’t notice anything wrong with your website, since every website he has been to would have likely been noticeably broken. Your website will look normal to Joe.
Further research has led me to understand that the absence of a doctype declaration at the beginning of my header.php was what’s been triggering quirks mode. Adding one has fixed the problem.
The question for me now is, why would the Frau theme developers have omitted this important bit of code? I did substantial modifications to their theme, but (without denying the possibility) I seriously doubt I did anything to remove it myself.
Whatever the case, thanks — seriously frustrating problem solved.
–JM
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
The Frau developers probably have made a mistake, I wouldn’t hold it against them since they made a whole theme and just missed this bit out.
Yeah … I know I shouldn’t be complaining about a free product — theirs was a very good base design, visually, that I was able to adapt to my needs. But coding-wise, the implementation is a mess. I ended up having to comment out large sections of it and replace it with my own code, to just to get it to mimic some of the functionality this theme claims to offer. I can only imagine WP novices attempting to use this theme will encounter many hours of frustration, and help requests to fora like this one.
Oh well, I’ve learned a few things in the process.
P.s. I’ll call this one resolved.
Hi may u post here what you exactly wrote in header.php…..
I added this code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
but nothing happened still showin different wiht IE no problem with chrome …and new versions of mozzila
site i’m working http://www.dressdana.ro
If someone can help me …please post here
