I’ve spent the better part of the night dealing with IE6 rendering issues. I don’t have a good test bed set up for testing browser problems for my personal sites so I miss major browser issues sometimes. I’ve been using a Visual Studio 2008 Virtual PC image to do some work with Astoria and decided to pull up my site to grab some sample code I uploaded a few weeks ago on the Entity Framework. The VS 2008 VPC is using IE6 so I brought up my site (this site) and was aghast as to how badly it looked.
Two major issues had to be addressed. The first was my use of a DOCTYPE tag on each page was forcing the pages to be rendered using the ‘quirks’ mode. I found this page in MSDN that helped me drop a quick script in the page to test out which rendering mode I was using. Here’s that page in case someone needs it:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533687.aspx
The second issue was how I was doing some things on the site (like centering of the content, background color of divs and borders). While these worked find in IE7 and Firefox (the two I always test in), IE6 was choking and mis-handling the look of the site. In all of these cases I was able to do a web search for “ie6” and the problem and I found solutions.
If any of my readers notice that the site renders oddly for them, please e-mail me a screenshot and the URL to the page so I can address them. I am most concerned about IE5, IE5.5, Safari and Opera. If you are using these browsers, please let me know if its broken.
