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**Oolong** · 06-01-2005, 06:00 AM

Hi,

First post here, so - hello, and please forgive any daftness...

I've just discovered that our online ticketing page is completely unusable in IE for the Mac (not sure which version - sorry!) - everything on the page is clustered, overlapping in the top left corner. I don't have a Mac myself, and I'm a relative newcomer to the vagaries of CSS, so I'm at a loss to figure out what's gone so horribly wrong.

Can anyone here help me out? The stylesheet is here, in case that helps.

Thanks!

- Fergus
oolong.co.uk

**chrishirst** · 06-01-2005, 08:44 AM

you have an invalid doctype which means that IE will be in "quirks" mode so it follows it's own rules. Use a Valid Doctype to make IE follow standards.

Also move the javascript from above the doctype either into the <head></head> area or preferably into an external .js file as client side code before the DTD also cause issues with IE.

**Oolong** · 06-01-2005, 09:29 AM

Thanks a lot Chris. I see what you mean.

The HTML is generated by ASP, so it sounds like I'll need to either learn enough ASP myself to make sure it gets the HTML right, or wait for the application vendor to fix the problem at their end (which does seem to be where it originated).

*sigh*

In the mean time, do you (or anyone) happen to know if there is any way that I could make Mac IE play nicely just by changing the CSS a bit?

**Oolong** · 06-07-2005, 09:14 AM

For what it's worth, it *looks* like the problem with the CSS itself was failing to specify which units certain sizes were specified in - I think perhaps when it saw 'size:12;' it just chose to interpret that as 12 micropixels, or something.

**ibbo** · 06-08-2005, 11:26 AM

IE MAC is a notoriously unfirendly beast when it comes to page layouts etc.

And I tend to avoid having to hack away untill it shows something presentable. Now this is avoidable if the page is not jazzed up and positioning is not to strict. However the more complex the page the more IE MAC will render it as complete nonsense (In my experience anyway).

Solution,

Tell whoever is trying to do it IE MAC to download firefox or something. Let them do the hard stuff and put your feet up.

But if you have plenty of time on your hands and you dont get upset too easy then try to your hearts content, then come back in a month and let us know how far you didnt get.

Ibbo

**Oolong** · 06-08-2005, 12:43 PM

hmm... cheers ibbo. The first thing I did was to suggest to the person who complained that they try viewing it in another browser, such as Safari. I do incline toward the view that it's the site controller's responsibility to make sure that all their visitors can see it okay - and that's doubly important with something like this, which is designed to sell tickets!

I've seen too many sites with notes about 'best viewed in Internet Explorer' - or which just fail to work in other browsers - to be altogether comfortable myself with putting up a note saying 'best viewed in anything except Internet Explorer', or words to that effect...

**Kaiman** · 06-09-2005, 01:14 AM

I would agree with you Oolong, I too think it is the designers job to create websites that work in as many browsers as possible, not the users responsibility. IE for Mac though is about ten times worse than IE for Windows, which is pretty bad to begin with. All I can say is do your best to work out the issues and then maybe put a link in there to Firefox or Safari, so that Mac people can download them, so the next time they go to your site the issues may be eliminated entirely.

Kaiman

Website Design and Hosting - Glenwood Springs, CO

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