Ie7 /CSS woes

[firemansam]

Hi
I am a full-time firefighter who is responsible for building and mantaining a firestation web-site. it's a love-job, not something i am paid to do.
Anyway, things were going well until i installed vista on my home pc and looked at the site in ie7. Arrrgggg ...it don't work no more!

[/URL] http://203.111.72.30/katoomba/

I've traced most of the problems to the pages not reading their stylesheets correctly, or not at all.

I can fix most of the problems by importing css directly on to the html page.

Does anyone know why ie7 only reads some of the imported stylesheet pages but will display correctly (well, almost) if the css is embedded into the htm page?

The one problem i have that affects all my pages is the menubar, which now overhangs the page. if i make it smaller to fit correctly it is to short in ie6.

BTW, i tried using the insert image button to put up a screen shot but it doesn't seem to work.

Any help would be appreciated as i appear to have a lot of typing to do as
this web-site was written entirely in notepad a few years ago, learning as i went, and now the cobwebs are quite thick.

[drhowarddrfine]

Well, there are 107 html errors and three CSS errors. It all started by using IE6 as your test browser, correct?

1) If you used IE6 to test, the very first line of the markup, the XML declaration, is only useful to modern browsers and all versions of IE do not qualify as a modern browser, so it chokes on it and goes into 'quirks mode'. So the whole page was created in quirks which is a huge Microsoft bug, to make the story short. (IE doesn't even know what xhtml is).

2) IE7 is better than IE6 as far as web standards are concerned so it interprets html/css more correctly, but that also breaks a lot of pages that were created in IE6. Though better than IE6, it only makes IE7 the second worst browser on the planet.

3) So since Microsoft can't figure out how to work the internet, it's always better to use modern browsers to test in first, such as...anything but IE, but this is after that fact and doesn't help now.

4) Xhtml requires all elements to be in lower case. Many of the errors reported above are caused by that. However, it probably isn't the cause of things because you aren't serving it as xhtml anyway.

So the best thing to do is start at the top of the error pages and work your way down. Or, start all over.

[tburger]

Well, there are 107 html errors and three CSS errors. It all started by using IE6 as your test browser, correct?

1) If you used IE6 to test, the very first line of the markup, the XML declaration, is only useful to modern browsers and all versions of IE do not qualify as a modern browser, so it chokes on it and goes into 'quirks mode'. So the whole page was created in quirks which is a huge Microsoft bug, to make the story short. (IE doesn't even know what xhtml is).

What is the best declaration to use then, Dr.?

Tom

[tburger]

Just for kicks:

Before you start a complete do-over, try linking your css pages instead of importing them. The following code should be placed in the "head" section

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="thenameofyourfile.css" media="screen" />

I'd be interested to see if this has any effect.

After that, it's best to listen to Doc...get rid of the xml declaration and get your code validated...

If you come across specific issues, let us know...

By the way, are you using any sort of manual or global reset on your page? This might help with consistent browser rendering...

Nice page =)

Tom

[jamesicus]

Here is my Problems serving XHTML Documents page, just FYI.

James
Pickering Pages
Web Authoring Pages

[drhowarddrfine]

What is the best declaration to use then, Dr.?

Tom

Normally, the only doctype to use would be html strict, or xhtml strict. However, I believe he is using deprecated elements. If he doesn't redo the page entirely to remove those, then the transitional doctype should be used. There is a brief article about that in the Articles section at the top.