This Page Doesn't Display in Internet Explorer

It was recently brought to my attention that The Fishbowl's front page doesn't render properly in Internet Explorer for Windows: for some reason the whole page stops at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar. Seeing as I do most of my browsing from OS X, I haven't noticed this. I'll hopefully fix it some time this weekend.

It would be nice, if this were to happen again in the future, if someone were to send me a polite email to let me know...

Update: I moved the sidebar onto the left, and the problem went away. Which is a pity because I don't think the site looks as good with a left-hand sidebar. A few months back when I was first setting up this weblog, I said this...

This isn't the first time I've had problems like this with Internet Explorer and CSS. Not by a long way. In a normal competitive environment, a browser that behaved so flakily the moment you tried to do anything complicated would lose market-share to its more able competitors, and be forced to improve its rendering. However, once a product attains the near-monopoly position that IE has, a reality distortion field comes into effect. It's no longer IE's fault that my page doesn't display correctly, it's my fault for writing a page that triggers one of IE's bugs.

This is not a good state of affairs.

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Helping IE6 limp along from phil ringnalda dot com on February 22, 2003 2:10 PM

IE6, the IE5.5 of a new generation, bites another person on the ass. Or perhaps the ankle. Read More

6 Comments

By Ben on February 22, 2003 7:46 PM

Ditto. FWIW, it's not just your site. Quite a few movable type ones lose their bottoms in IE Win.

Which can't be pleasant :-)

By JJL on February 22, 2003 9:09 PM

It's happening again today. I've noticed that when this happens with my MovableType blog, the only way to fix it is by adding enough line breaks into the sidebar to make sure it's always longer than the text, or adding a 1 pixel image there and specifying some ridiculous height attribute. Neither is much fun. I'd sure love to know what causes the problem so it could be fixed more directly!

By Ronaldo on February 24, 2003 11:06 PM

This is a known problem. Adding <br clear="all" /> just after the end of the template seems to fix the problem in most instances.

By Anonymous on February 26, 2003 4:39 PM

I agree.. The whole site just seems 'thrown off' by the left-hand sidebar.

I say put it back, and let people use a real browser. :>

By Charles Miller on February 27, 2003 8:44 AM

Thanks, Ronaldo. Putting at the end of the sidebar seems to have fixed it at least on the version of the browser I'm using here.

By Ronaldo on March 8, 2003 3:59 AM

I'm glad it helped :)

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