IE6 won't display my page!

[arioch]

For some reason, IE6 won't display my "Opensource and economy" page on my site www.mylounge.dk

Any particular reason for this? No other browsers gives me any trouble, and the pages validate just fine.

I just discovered that the link in this post to the index page of the site doesn't work in either IE6 or Moz firebird. I am clueless!?!?!:(

[madcompnerd]

Watch the periods dude ;).
IE's CSS2 support is a joke...

Looked to me like your css file has an error, the body was never ended. It could just be your bad indentation, but that's how it looked to me. Make sure your css is good, css2 can work pretty well in IE, you just can't make mistakes and you have to be careful with the elements that IE does wrong.

[arioch]

How come the CSS validates fine then?

[fatTrav]

Valid CSS doesn't mean IE or other browsers will support it. IE's CSS support is a joke and there are many css sites out there that explain all the 'hacks' one must do for IE to render a site properly.

Bottom line...pure, clean css will not render correctly in IE oftentimes. If you want IE to render a pure css page right, you gotta use the known IE hacks.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/journey/ that is an interesting article about switching from a tables site to a pure css and all the pitfalls the man encountered.

a regular google for "Internet Explorer CSS" comes up with a lot more information that may proove helpful.

[bwkaz]

The correct link would be www.mylounge.dk. Without the period inside the link text (make sure you close your [/i]] tag before the period). ;)

But as to the problem... hmm. Maybe it would help to give the document a real, full DOCTYPE, with the correct DTD URI? Right now it renders in Quirks mode in Firefox at least, because it's missing a DTD URI in the DOCTYPE tag. See [url]http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.2 for a list of valid HTML 4 doctype elements, and copy one of them (for the moment, you'll likely want the "transitional" one). If that works, stop.

Otherwise, try fixing the one CSS issue that the W3C's CSS validator brings up -- make sure you put a "generic" font-family in the list (e.g., "sans-serif"). The CSS body style element is closed properly, because the validator shows it pretty-printed, and it's closed there. That doesn't even look like CSS2, it looks like plain old CSS1 (at least to me). In my experience, IE supports CSS1 OK (not all of it, but it definitely works with most of the basic elements).

The next step would be to change it from HTML 4.01 Transitional to HTML 4.01 Strict (i.e., remove all the deprecated tags, if there are any; I don't think there are though). That would also be a GREAT time to move from <br> tags to <p> tags to enclose your paragraphs. Let the browser insert line breaks at the end of each paragraph for you.

If that still doesn't help, try switching to XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict. That will allow you to get rid of your "tag soup". (You will be FORCED to close all your XHTML tags explicitly, instead of allowing them to just close on their own. If the tag doesn't have any data, like the <br> tags mentioned earlier, then you will have to change them into <br /> instead. And you'll have to make all your tags lowercase.)

For an example of stuff that at least used to work, see one of my webpages at http://kdzbn.homelinux.net/dfGUI-linux/ -- that one worked OK in IE the last time I tried it. I will also review it tomorrow at work, to ensure it still works, but I don't expect any problems. The CSS is at http://kdzbn.homelinux.net/css/screen.css too, if you want to see that.

If none of this helps, then what exactly do you see in IE6?

[arioch]

Thanx for the extensive amount of suggestions!

The message i get is: The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is plain ol' CSS1

A thought.

The problem I have, is uniquely tied to that one document. Why aren't both documents affected? If the CSS and doctype was faulty, wouldn't they both be affected? - since they both point to the same external stylesheet and have the same doctype?

I don't get the doctype thing, I've looked at numerous pages with tons pf CSS that has the same doctype as mine, these pages are not the least problematic.

Switching to XHTML? That would require learning it, wouldn't it?

The "strict" suggestion didn't work. It got me "page cannot be displayed". (I just swapped "transitional" with "strict" I Assume that's correct?)

[cybertron]

XHTML is very like HTML, except that it's more "correct" as far as following the guidelines that HTML was supposed to follow. For instance, all of your tags must be closed, either with opening and closing tags, or by adding a / at the end of a tag, like this:

<br />


The biggest difficult is getting rid of your deprecated tags (for instance, font tags), but once you switch to XHTML you should be good to go for a number of years to come. If you already know CSS you've got a good start since a lot of the formatting stuff has been moved out of XHTML and into CSS.

[bwkaz]

Um...

I just tried your page from work (I tested my page this morning, and it does still work properly) in IE6, and it works fine for me... Are you SURE you're typing the site name correctly? No trailing punctuation or anything like that? (The error you posted is usually generated when IE can't find the site you told it to go to, or it got an HTTP 404 error.)

[arioch]

Also the "Opensource and economy" page?

I have no problem entering the main (index) page, but from there, i can't enter "Opensource and economy" from the menubar on the left with IE6.

I upgraded the page to XHTML 1.0 and it still doesn't do it for me.

[arioch]

GOT IT!

IE6 doesn't like my national letter "ø" in the document title:rolleyes:



Thanx a bunch for the assist.

[cybertron]

I'm guessing it has to do with the span tag around the !. Try removing it and see if the space goes away. The browser is probably trying to leave space for that font size to have letters like g and q that hang down. I'm not entirely sure how you could fix that and still have the big !, but there's probably some way around that.

[arioch]

Hi! I fixed the link thing via CSS.

I'm all set now with my anti-softwarepatent crusade, except for one small detail. When i try to validate my CSS i get:

Line: 0

Parse error - Unrecognized

I cannot see what's wrong here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="da">

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by arioch
Also the "Opensource and economy" page? OH!

I completely missed that in your first post... err, never mind. :o

Glad you got the first bit fixed though!

On the validation error, you have an extra closing curly brace at the end of your CSS file.

This is why it's helpful to choose a single CSS brace style and stick with it. I use the following style:

selector {
property: value;
} except for the body selector (and I'm not really sure why I varied on that one -- I should go change it).

With a consistent style, it's easier to match up matching braces (or even quotes).

You will also want to validate your CSS file at the Web Design Group -- they give you more warnings that have to do with usability than the W3C's CSS validator does (the W3C's validator only gives you syntax errors; the WDG validator gives you the other design stuff too).

http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/

That validator requires the URL to your stylesheet, though, not just to the webpage. And I see that I have 3 issues in my own stylesheet that I need to fix according to them -- will do that in a few minutes here.

[arioch]

Thanx a bunch dude!

This may seem idiotic, but I imagined "line 0" to be the very first line...:rolleyes: