IE problems on a site which has both valid css and xhtml

[Paul F. Johnson]

Hi,

The following site works fine under Moz 1.6 (Linux) and Firebird 0.8
(Linux). Under IE, nothing happens on screen. Zilch. Nada.

Both the html and css files validate at w3c. I've only (so far) tested it
at 1024 x 768. I know there is an issue with the drop down menu system,
but it's a development site, so that's to be expected.

Can anyone see the problem - my head hurts from staring at a screen....

http://ahnews.music.salford.ac.uk/accu

TTFN

Paul

 

[Barry Pearson]

Hi,
The following site works fine under Moz 1.6 (Linux) and Firebird 0.8
(Linux). Under IE, nothing happens on screen. Zilch. Nada.

Both the html and css files validate at w3c. I've only (so far)
tested it at 1024 x 768. I know there is an issue with the drop down
menu system, but it's a development site, so that's to be expected.

Can anyone see the problem - my head hurts from staring at a
screen....
http://ahnews.music.salford.ac.uk/accu

It certainly is amazing! Opera 7.32 can't handle it either. I loaded the HTML
into Dreamweaver, and in design view (WYSIWYG mode) it didn't show anything -
just like IE.

Try this. Delete the line:
<script src="javascript/resize.js" language="JavaScript"
type="text/javascript" />

I have no idea why, but it made the page appear in these browsers when I
called them from Dreamweaver. If you find out why, please tell me. But this
may be homing-in on your problem.

 

[Barry Pearson]

Hi,
The following site works fine under Moz 1.6 (Linux) and Firebird 0.8
(Linux). Under IE, nothing happens on screen. Zilch. Nada. [snip]
Can anyone see the problem - my head hurts from staring at a
screen....
http://ahnews.music.salford.ac.uk/accu

It certainly is amazing! Opera 7.32 can't handle it either. I loaded
the HTML into Dreamweaver, and in design view (WYSIWYG mode) it
didn't show anything - just like IE.

Try this. Delete the line:
<script src="javascript/resize.js" language="JavaScript"
type="text/javascript" />

I have no idea why, but it made the page appear in these browsers
when I called them from Dreamweaver. If you find out why, please tell
me. But this may be homing-in on your problem.

I wonder:

Does any package that doesn't understand XHTML fail to realise that " /> is
equivalent to a closing tag? Therefore, they think the whole of the rest of
the document is script. And I'm pretty sure that IE is such a package. And so
is Dreamweaver 4, I think.

So, if you (Paul) had <script ...></script> instead (I'm assuming that is
still valid XHTML?), would that work with non-XHTML-aware packages?

I just tried putting <script /> into a random document, and Dreamweaver
stopped displaying the document. But, as expected, <script></script> was OK.

If so, that exposes a problem with any element that *requires* a closing tag -
it won't be sufficient to use " />". (But what else is there? <object>?
<iframe>? Hm! I'll stick to HTML).

 

[Paul F. Johnson]

Barry Pearson did utter the following words of wisdom:

Does any package that doesn't understand XHTML fail to realise that " /> is
equivalent to a closing tag? Therefore, they think the whole of the rest of
the document is script. And I'm pretty sure that IE is such a package. And so
is Dreamweaver 4, I think.

So, if you (Paul) had <script ...></script> instead (I'm assuming that is
still valid XHTML?), would that work with non-XHTML-aware packages?

IE5.5 and 6 understands XHTML - but they (MS) probably thought it would be
a nice "feature" for it not to work properly, like CSS and JS...

If so, that exposes a problem with any element that *requires* a closing
tag - it won't be sufficient to use " />". (But what else is there?
<object>? <iframe>? Hm! I'll stick to HTML).

There are lots of bits which can be used as a singleton rather than a
doublet (i.e. the likes of link). I wonder if there is a list somewhere of
what IE gets wrong so I can avoid them in future.

Oh for the day when browsers, irresepective of platform, obey properly the
W3C standard and not what they think it means.

TTFN

Paul

 

[Barry Pearson]

Barry Pearson did utter the following words of wisdom:

As a matter of interest, does this solve the problem?

IE5.5 and 6 understands XHTML - but they (MS) probably thought it
would be a nice "feature" for it not to work properly, like CSS and
JS...

Do they actually understand the difference between HTML & XHTML? I thought,
from what I read elsewhere, that the syntax (in particular the space before
the "/>") exploited a bug in IE, and tricked IE into handling XHTML even
though it wasn't designed to? (Or have I got that wrong?)

There are lots of bits which can be used as a singleton rather than a
doublet (i.e. the likes of link). I wonder if there is a list
somewhere of what IE gets wrong so I can avoid them in future.

[snip]

And Opera 7.23 got this wrong! But it is a good question - I've didn't find
such a source when I was deciding whether to stick with HTML (which I did) or
move to XHTML.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

IE5.5 and 6 understands XHTML - but they (MS) probably thought it would be
a nice "feature" for it not to work properly, like CSS and JS...

Only for some values of "understands".

All old browsers (even going back to things like Netscape 1, IE 2, Mosaic
0.6, etc) *can* understand *some* XHTML, but they don't *realise* what
they're looking at is XHTML: they think they're looking at some slightly
malformed HTML. Their error recovery algorithms kick in and they do a
reasonable job.

All current versions of Internet Explorer for any platform fit into this
category.