ordered list (and IE) - html

My list ordering appears fine in chrome and FF, but not in IE (all appear as 1's).
I'm not even sure where to begin regarding what's going on.
I spent a little time on a google search, but I'm still not sure where to begin (my keyword combinations didn't bring me what I'm looking for, but a question about formatting problems in IE did bring me to this site, so I thought I'd try; I like the related questions window above the text box).
If any thoughtful readers have tips, tricks, links, suggestions, solutions, I'm interested in why it happens and how to fix it.
Here's the link: http://www.technion.ac.il/~balazs/htms/tops1.3.htm
We're a small enough community to tell folks to look at it in FF or Chrome, BUT I'd rather learn how to do it right . . .
Thank you in advance for any feedback!

Whenever a page doesn't render as I expect, the first thing that I do is run it through the w3c markup validation service.
The following page highlights a number of errors with your HTML:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.technion.ac.il%2F%7Ebalazs%2Fhtms%2Ftops1.3.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
Fix those up and all should be rosy!

You need to use the li element for lists. Any other tags are not allowed and will not validate. You seems to be using some sort of WYSISYG program or CMS that's wrapping each li in a span that gives them a black font color and a slightly larger size.
<ol>
<span style="font-size: larger; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><li>Login and open the program</li></span>
<ol type="a">
<li>Sign the logbook (name and phone number)</li>
...
The reason why in Firefox and Chrome it works is because they're slightly more forgiving.
And will you now excuse me while I rinse the residue image of Comic Sans from my eyes?

Related

Numerals as first characters in a line of html text are not displaying in Chrome

I'm observing this super weird bug on a news site maybe someone has seen before.
In the html text, if the first characters in a line of text are numerals, they are not displayed by the browser.
The html is coming through via a CMS, which forces the line breaks in the editor, but no tags are inserted. CMS data is XSLT processed into html templates.
When this text is sent to the browser, you can see the new lines are formed (without br tags), and you see that the numerals are still within the content. But these new lines are only honored by the browser if a white-space property is set using one of the "pre" values.
Seems to be related to the white space property as i can use the inspector to add white-space:pre-line/pre-wrap and boom, they appear.
Really keen to hear some thoughts on this, or could this be a possible Chrome bug?
Link to an example article here:
tvnz.co.nz/national-news/flights-cancelled-130km-h-winds-hit-wellington-5508294
In the last paragraph of that article you can read/inspect to see the missing numeral values.
So I really don't understand why this happens, but it has something to with the zoom setting... There are all kinds of articles about chrome bugs w/ the zoom setting, but none seem to address exactly what you were seeing...
If you inspect the page and change the zoom from 1 to .99999 it works... Again, I got the suggestion from this link but I'm at a loss to explain exactly what is broken w/ chrome, but it does seem like a chrome bug...

Chrome isn't correctly displaying "rgba()" styles in some element backgrounds... (no alpha blending)

I'm putting together a page, and am really struggling with backgrounds across browsers.
The page uses a number of alpha-blended backgrounds, box shadows and border-radii and it is composited almost entirely using inline styles (essentially there are few/no CSS classes used).
IE9 is my primary browser, and in it, the page looks great. However, on Chrome (and I'm told Firefox), most of my alpha-blended backgrounds render either not-at-all (transparent), or as solid colors! I'm using Standards Mode with an HTML5 !DOCTYPE declaration, so it's not as though I'm leveraging IE quirks or anything!
Clearly on IE versions before 9, the backgrounds (and other things are problematic). But I'm not concerned with supporting ancient software, and those users get a browsing experience that they deserve.
The common refrain for years has been that "transparency on IE sucks!", so I was comfortable in expecting that if I got it to work adequately on IE (typically the worst platform), then the others would just fall in line, but here I am struggling in the opposite direction! I'm using the standard "rgba(r,g,b,a);" directive on the "background-Color" attribute so I'm not using any radical DirectX filters or other magic, nevertheless, on (NOT Internet Explorer 9+) browsers, I'm getting some non-alpha-blended results (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't).
The site can be previewed at: https://net-xpert.com/ -- All of the pull-down menus are supposed to have translucent backgrounds, and so too the hovering link-bar at the bottom of the page. Also if you go to the "Ask us a Question" page, the dialog there should have tinted backgrounds on all of the input fields...
Oh, lastly, I am ENTIRELY LOATHE to implement ANY b/s, browser/platform-specific, 'experimental' style-codes! Anything in CSS2/3 is fine, but I simply REFUSE to use any kind of "-browser-some-quirky-CSSAttribute" styles! (I wish more developers would do this too! -- then browser manufacturers would be under greater pressure to adopt these STANDARDS and our lives would be SO MUCH EASIER, but I digress...)
Anyway, any insight on a standards-compliant solution would be greatly appreciated (even if it's just a communal acknowledgement that "ya, Chrome et al is currently not implementing this correctly...", at least then I'll know there's nothing to be done about it...)
Thanks!
Well, this is a very late answer, but maybe this'll still be of use to you (your site still seems to be up and running).
I have a should-work-for-you solution, assuming that you can modify one of your stylesheets. As to WHY you've encountered this problem ..? I can only speculate, because I don't know how to recreate your exact configuration.
The fix;
div[id^=mainMenuOverDiv] {
background-color: rgba(128,128,128,0.9) !important;
}
I'm not a fan of using !important unecessarily, and you may be able to remove that by using greater specificity. I've tested this in Firefox, though and it seems to work - obviously, you'll want to substitute the actual rgba(x,x,x,x) values with your own.
You seem to be using some JavaScript (I'm assuming) which randomizes the DIV ID every time you hover over the menu - but the beginning remains consistent (i.e. one time it will be #mainMenuOverDivjkhasdfsd89f9f9sdfl3l4l34lfdbvbc, then the next, it'll be #mainMenuOverDivLSDklsdkmlzxncbzmxnc90234xcvassf). Using the 'starts with' CSS selector (as provided in the example), you can still isolate the menu despite this potential spanner in the works.
It's interesting (and probably insightful) that this even works, given that inline CSS usually can't be overridden.
As for why this is happening, one possibility is that some JavaScript generated code is not correctly porting over to the non-IE browsers. Alternatively, if you're using it anywhere, code minification may also break some functionality (and vary between browsers) - many minification plugins need to be tweaked for individual setups to ensure that everything continues to work fine as one size does not necessarily fit all. For example, you might find that on one site you can minify everything except the JavaScript, while on another site, JavaScript is fine, but you can't minify inline CSS, etc. Google Analytics code sometimes falls victim to this.
So to my eye, the issue possibly isn't to do with IE/Chrome/Firefox or Safari - transparency is working fine on all of them - I think it's most likely the way your code is being manipulated or delivered to the browser.
Hope that helps in some way. Let me know if you can't use an external stylesheet and I'll try to find an alternative.

the letters "ff" in "staff" are not displayed in Firefox

I am observing a weird behavior in Firefox. I have a sub-nav menu item labelled 'Faculty and Staff'. Somehow Firefox(latest-always updated) is eating up the 'ff' in staff. The html source looks fine(even in firebug). The menu-item displays correctly in chrome though.
Do we have any idea about this issue? or should i log a bug with firefox?
Screenshot:
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/bf945.png
Are you sure it really is two f's?
My guess is that your authoring application transformed the ff into the 'ff' ligature, which your specific font does not have a glyph for.
See here:
ff vs. ff
You could test this, by going into your source and trying to select only 1 of the two f's. If you can only select them both at the same time, it's a single character and thus the ligature.
Yahoooo!
Currently solved by using:
-moz-font-feature-settings: "liga=0";
So this confirms that Firefox was in fact trying to treat that as a ligature.
Thank you all for helping me look in the right direction. Wouldn't have been possible with you guys. I <3 stackoverflow and the community :).

Weird whitespace appearing on Joomla

While polishing my site I noticed there was some unwanted space between 2 elements, so I decided to remove it. But looking at the source, I found this:
Please check it by yourself, there's no trace of this server-side. Live page here: http://www.playersonline.com.ar/guias
Any help would be appreciated.
Not sure where the mysterious whitespace is coming from, but modifying your #k2Container CSS will solve the problem for you:
#k2Container {
padding:0;
position: relative;
top: -20px; /* adjust as needed */
}
Checked in Firebug, Chrome, Firefox Webmaster Tools, and via validator. Half indicate stray characters. Half don't.
Often times, you can solve an issue like this with Firefox Web Developer Tool's "View Generated Source" which is important for browsers like Firefox that are intelligent enough to fix the problems themselves (unlike IE I might add) Non breaking spaces are a great example of an element that can toy with IE but will never show up on Firefox with this feature. Here's the link if you don't have it: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
I'd say take 20 minutes to grep your code again for the string " . " If that doesn't find a result, by all means consider Pat's suggestion. That's one heck of a lot of divs to deal with!

Strategy for Fixing Layout Bugs in IE6?

Generally, what's the best way to tackle a layout bug in IE6? What are the most common bugs or problems that one should look for when trying to figure out why your page suddenly looks like a monkey coded it?
First Things First
Get yourself the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. It's a life saver and works great with IE6 and/or IE7. It's no replacement for Web Developer Toolbar or Firebug for Firefox, but it's better than nothing.
Know Thy Enemy
Read up on the quirks of IE — particularly hasLayout and overflow and the like. There are also many CSS niceties that you'll have to either do without or find alternatives. Look into how many of the popular JavaScript toolkits/frameworks/libraries get around different issues.
Rome Wasn't Built in a Day
The more you have to work with it, the more you'll remember off hand and won't have to lookup as often. There's just no replacement for experience in this. As several have pointed out, though, there are great resources out there on the net. Position Is Everything is certainly up there.
http://www.positioniseverything.net/ will certainly address your problem.
It provides comprehensive and in-depth descriptions of browser bugs along with options to work around them. A must read, in my opinion,
One good way to start learning about how IE happens to be mangling the page is to turn on red borders on different elements with CSS (border: 1px solid red;). This will immediately tell you whether it's a margin problem or a padding problem, how wide the element really is, etc.
The box model is usually the culprit. Basically what this means is that any div you are trying to position and use unsupported CSS with will cause this problem.
You may find it happens if you are using min-{width,height} or max-{width,height}.
this provides a great reference for checking compadibility with different versions.
http://www.aptana.com/reference/html/api/CSS.index.html
Noticed that Marc's post is at a -2 =D. He's only saying "resort to tables" even though they blow, because in sucky browsers like IE6, some of the broken CSS commands work in tables only (who know's why... dam you Bill Gates!!!). Here's a good reference to see what works and doesn't work as far as CSS goes. http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html . It's a great reference to check on what cool effects work/don't work with various, widely used browsers. Also, always have a go-to plan for users who browse with IE6 (even though it's just about as old as mechanical dirt) as many businesses still use older browsers (including non-profits/3rd world countries etc.) So by all means, create the bugged out drop-down menu that looks WAY better than a standard horizontal menu, but create a secondary one specifically for IE6 that becomes the default when the page receives a request from an IE6 browser.
how do you define layout bug? the most frustrating layout implementation (i don't know if this should be defined as bug) in IE is we need to always specify style="display:inline" in the HTML <form> tag so that a blank line won't appear to disturb the form layout.
This question I believe has far too much scope.
Validate your code, and if pain persists, well, good luck.
The only real solutions, as with any other ballpark bug type are to google for a solution, or ask somebody who knows, ( ie: give the exact problem to us here at stackoverflow ).
You can use the IE Dev toolbar to glean an Idea, but many of the bugs are random, inexplicable, and esoteric. IE: the guillotine bug, the random item duplication bug, etc etc, the list goes on, and you can spend hours literally goofing with stupid variables everywhere and achieve nothing.
I have a simple strategy that works every time.
First, I develop the site using commonly accepted CSS to look good in Safari and Firefox 3. See w3schools.com for details on browser support.
Then, I go into IE6 and IE7 and alter the CSS using conditional includes.
This is hack free and lets you handle different browsers (IE6 and IE7 have separate issues).
Most of the issues you'll find come from unsupported features in IE (like min-width), errors in the box model (IE adds unseen extra padding (3px) to some boxes), or positioning issues. Go for those first as they are often the issue.
A common problem is padding not getting added to the width of a block element. So for layout div's, avoid using padding and instead use elements within them to define the padding.
I use Rafel Lima's Browser Selector when I need to tweak differences between IE/Standards browsers. It greatly reduces using "hacks" in your HTML to solve common problems.
You can target CSS statements for different browsers, or even different versions of browsers (Hello IE 6). It's very simple to implement, but requires the user has JavaScript turned on (most do).
.thing { ....}
.ie .thing { ....}
.ie6 .thing { ....}
We had a floating div issue that was only evident in a particular version of IE6. It was fixed by downloading the latest service pack.
In theory, use CSS compatible with IE6 layout bugs, utilise only well known workarounds (css and html filters) and code for them in a way that wont break forward compatibility, test for quirks/strict mode.
In reality, resort to tables.