You have 12 validation errors in your XHTML and one in your CSS. Fixing those may or may not help with IE, but it’s a good place to start.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
http://validator.w3.org/
There are hacks to make Internet Explorer behave or you may want to put together an alternate stylesheet for Internet Explorer.
http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2004/02/css-ie-only
You have several floats in there. Internet Explorer often has odd reactions to floats.
width isn’t interpreted the same in IE and Firefox for example, so my guess is that the sidebar and the main content is getting to wide, so there isn’t enough room inside your content div.
Take a look at that if validating your code won’t work.
Thread Starter
rundy
(@rundy)
Thank you tomhanna and eridan.
I corrected the validation problems but that didn’t solve “my” problem. I then followed eridan’s suggestion and changed the width of content from “490” to “290”. Tada! The side bar now pops up where it is supposed to be in IE. Thank you, and thank you!
Obviously I can tweak the size back toward the 490 until I figure out what my limit is in IE. But this leads me to the question, what isn’t pixel dimensions interperted the same way in all browsers? I thought defining size by pixel was the one way to get all browsers to size the same. What gives with IE?
Thread Starter
rundy
(@rundy)
Yep, that sounds like it could be the problem.
Ugh. I hate IE.
Thanks again for the help.
Rundy
Thread Starter
rundy
(@rundy)
Okay. I’m pretty sure I figured this one out.
The problem is that IE barfs on my margin.
For example go to:
http://www.silverwarethief.com/test/htmltest.php
with the css file:
http://www.silverwarethief.com/test/style.css
and in IE6 it will look fine.
but go to
http://www.silverwarethief.com/test/notworkhtmltest.php
with the css file:
http://www.silverwarethief.com/test/notworkstyle.css
and it won’t look right in IE6
In FF and Opera both pages will look the same.
The only difference is that in one style sheet the spacing on the right is obtained by padding and in the other (not working in IE page) the spacing is obtained with margin.
(This post was edited becaust I discovered my previously given conclusion was incorrect.)
So, if you have a style that works ok in IE and a style you like better for other browsers, use conditional tags to send IE to the alternate stylesheet.
