Appearance in IE 7

Hi Nozmo, what you are experiencing is an age old issue between markup code/css and browsers. With a variety of browsers from different makers, and lacking a true standardization in markup and CSS the only known solution is to design according to how well you can make a round peg fit into a square hole.

IE tells you if there are errors on any web page it displays with a yellow triangle and an exclamation mark in it at the bottom of your browser. This for the most part is just a minor FYI tool that a page has some erroneous code and can’t be displayed properly. Again, what is “properly” if there is no standard “proper”? So..I always tell folks, to use the minimalist design theory and keep the code short, sweet, basic, and functional, for both markup and CSS.

If you feel you want to take on a challenge, you can make the changes yourself to the Ocean Mist theme, but if you are not fully prepared to learn a lot, and are willing to work with generally “popular” ideas of how a web page should display and the code that is best (by opinion), then I would say have fun while doing it.

The issue is not so daunting. The W3C will validate your code based on “widely accepted” and proper use of code, but again, that doesn’t mean the browser makers are forced to follow suit and “make use” of the widely accepted code usage.

I have always come down to designing a web site based purely on what I think the most popular browser will be used to view it, which varies with a target market, type of content of the website, and type of computer the viewer might have (mac vs IBM PC vs linux/unix). There are so many variables. A good rule of thumb is to have more than one browser installed, and design or code your site to display as good as possible across many browser platforms, or you could pick one browser and make it almost perfect for that one browser.

You shouldn’t have a problem making the corrections noted in red if you cut and paste. Keep in mind, the most common problem from attempting to fix is a simple typo, and also keep in mind, an erroneous “space” is a typo too.

Good Luck

correcting those errors will not fix that problem. You can see evidence of that here:

https://www.village-idiot.org/broke/News.htm

Theres a validator link at the bottom that I added so that you can run it through and see ??

Have you edited the style.css that came originally with that theme?

Nozmo, just an FYI, as you mentioned and I support, IE7 (or any earlier version) is the problem and does not display the page properly. Firefox, Camino, Safari, and Opera all display the page properly with the correct spacing because these browsers are interpreting the code correctly.

IE’s known issues is that is does not properly display a blank space beneath a container that is not specifically identified as a blank space with either a <p>paragraph marker, a zero pixel border marker, or any of the other various space creating code. All your buttons and images are displayed with a space beneath them and centered in that space on all other browsers that I used because those browsers are interpreting the code properly.

You can choose to fix this with a code for an extra line, or a break < /> or <br> or </br> or <p> etc infinitum, however, all other browsers will read and interpret this extra code accordingly and will change the way it is displayed in those other browsers. This is totally up to you if you want to change it or leave it as is. My guess is that there will be a higher ratio of people seeing it displayed properly than not seeing it displayed properly (dependent on Browser preference of the person viewing it).

Thank you for all this helpful advice – I’m not exacly sure what I will do next. But is there any thoughts that this particular theme is just “problematic” or do all themes run into these kinds of issues.

Is there any information or insight into what browsers are most commonly used. I just assumed that most people converted to IE7, but that may be completely untrue.