[Theme: Twenty Twelve] nav bar fails in IE8

Getting IE9 out of compatibility mode fixes the menus, but nothing appear to be able to fix them for IE 7 and 8. The code mentioned above was not helpful, when inserted into header.php several different ways. Since the entire purpose of moving our website to WordPress from Mickysoft Publisher 2003 was the lack of support for their proprietary menus – in that case by IE 8 and IE 9 (IE 7 worked, as did Safari and Firefox), delivering a new website with a known menu compatibility problem will not be acceptable.

I switched my site back to Twenty Eleven and the menus work in every browser that I have available to test with – IE 7 thru 9 (compatibility mode on OR off), Safari, and Firefox (Mac and Win). I’ll revisit Twenty Twelve if the menus get fixed, but not before; I already wasted several days on technical issues that should have been spent on content (which is the whole point). Thanks for clarifying why I was having problems after activating Twenty Twelve..

I think 2012 is great and wonder about the mindset that thinks people should support flawed software that the creators of will not.

We dislike IE8, BUT much of the business world is still using it.

Please fix this.

I posted a patch on Trac earlier this evening that produced could results for for me in IE7 & IE8 on the navigation menu. If you have the capability to test the patch, please do. If not, you can visit https://trunk.werdswords.com using IE7 or IE8, to see if the nav is working closer to what you expect. Feedback welcome.

I understand the difficulties in making design decisions like this, but there is a glaring error here:

The download page does NOT mention that this theme completely breaks in IE 8.

You should have mentioned this in obvious text on the download page. I didn’t realize the problem until I got 15 hours into development and now I’ve got to hack 2012 or port my changes to 2011.

pha3z: Could you be more specific about what “completely breaks” other than the nav showing as the mobile menu?

Can anyone shed some light on how the 2012 theme javascript menu for mobile is even working? The simple .js file baffles me. It just defines a function with other functions inside, and it looks like that’s not all the code either, but I don’t see anymore elsewhere. Any help to point me in the right direction?

I’m not keen on using Drew Jayne’s fix by adding additional javascript to 2012. I actually don’t believe in mobile-first approaches and I quickly reversed the media query ordering on my stylesheet to do a desktop first approach which easily fixes ie 8 in my child theme. But now the javascript mobile menu doesn’t work at all, and I don’t understand how it was working to begin with.

@drew Jaynes:

“Could you be more specific about what “completely breaks” other than the nav showing as the mobile menu?”

2012 uses mobile-first approach. I didn’t realize what this was or what it meant until now. I’ve never worked with this workflow. I always go Desktop first in my stylesheets. I just started adding my responsive styling to a copy of the 2012 style.css for my childtheme and then I discovered it was all broken in ie8. That’s what I meant.

Drew:

Your horizontal nav works on my Win XP computer in IE8. The menu appears in two rows, which is what I assume was your intention. Dropdown menus work from menu items in the second row; I don’t see any dropdowns from the top row, but I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not.

Good job on your patch. Is it fairly straightforward to install the patch?

MORE:

My opinion on the whole matter is that mobile first is just a silly industry buzz that’s getting over-hyped and 2012 should never have been developed with mobile first. Mobile designs are simple whereas desktop designs are generally more complex in layout. It makes more sense to build a complex layout and scale it down than to go the other way.

Since 2012 is supposed to be the flagship theme for WP 3.5, and a best practice approach is to build responsive child themes based on 2012, I think the whole premise with 2012 is backwards. It breaks compatibility just to go with a popularized trend that may or may not even be the best way to work. Plenty of people don’t use mobile first and disagree about it. When it creates problems like this one, I just don’t see how its an acceptable design decision for the flagship theme.

Correction.

On Drew’s patch, I do see dropdown items from the top row of menu options. Due to the lack of color contrast, they are difficult to see, but they are there.

I figured out how the Twenty Twelve menu works (answering my own question). I created a thread about it here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/how-does-twenty-twelve-nav-menu-work?replies=2#post-3217667

There is something about this theme (or is it my site?) that is throwing it into Compatibility View on IE9 on my Win 7 64-machine.

Note that I have the original Adobe Type 1 fonts installed on this computer, which apparently are not compatible with Windows and IE. The CSS for Twenty Twelve specifies Helvetica (one of the Type 1 fonts) in at least two places.

A few Internet resources urge designers to either delete Helvetica from CSS or at least list Arial first. Otherwise IE 9 breaks.

I tried commenting out the two lines that reference Helvetica, and still IE goes into Compatibility Mode.

(I even get forced into Compatibility when using Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven with this site, so there is either something wrong with my pages or with my browser.)

This is what I’m working on: https://www.india-custom-tours-blog.com/

jlehrer,

Try this line in your header.php just inside the <head> section and see if it forces IE out of Compatibility View.

<!-- [if IE]> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"/> <! [endif]-->

My previous theme failed for some reason and I installed Twenty Twelve as I rather liked the look of it. I’m not a techie and it’s only when I asked a friend to get rid of the menu icon that I found out that only IE users were seeing that.

My biggest problem though is that whilst I like the openness of the theme in IE it looks completely different in Firefox and Chrome and I don’t really like it’s boxed in look.

Looking at my site stats it seems that over 50% of my readers use IE so it’s a shame that the developers haven’t tested it properly despite their claim that “it looks great on any device.”