[Rt-devel] RT CSS Overhaul (ATTENTION W3M AND IE USERS)]

Thu Oct 7 13:26:16 EDT 2004

Unfortunately, your accessibility guru's comments beat a number of CSS 
fixes I made for IE.

On Oct 7, 2004, at 7:02 AM, Andrew Stribblehill wrote:

> [Chris, how does this seem to you?]
>
> I've spoken to our web accessibility expert and he has the following
> comments:
>
>> Gecko: Lose the position: fixed; stuff. It's still a nightmare to
>> use. Use position: absolute; instead. (Will also better work in IE)

Other users have expressed a very strong preference the other way. (For 
IE, I implemented a fallback to absolute positioning.

>> Make it work at reasonable resolutions - I'm running at 831px wide
>> and it doesn't fit.

On what browser and what pages? There's a known issue with fit on IE at 
the moment.

>> Get rid of the font sizes set in px - they won't rescale in IE, and
>> not particularly well in anything else.

*nod* This update goes a _long_ way to doing that from the previous 
version where almost everything was absolutely set.

>> Use caution with font sizes
>> <100% (80% is likely to be unreadable in some situations, 90%
>> should be okay but not for paragraphs of text)

What's recommended for doing smaller labels?

>> Opera: The horizontal scrolling doesn't happen, the stuff that
>> would generate a horizontal scrollbar just goes off the right of
>> the screen.  (Opera is available for Linux for testing)
>>
>> IE6/Win: I can't see the login box. This suggests that the rest of
>> the stylesheet will be badly messed up too. (After using the
>> keyboard navigation and a bit of guesswork, managed to log in
>> anyway. The top half of the layout is in pieces, the main area and
>> footer is okay but is also about a screen height down the page...

This should all be _significantly_ better now.

>> (A single windows box isn't that expensive for testing and can have
>> IE 5, 5.5 and 6 co-installed on it. Trying to debug IE CSS layout
>> via second-hand reports of what looks wrong is near-impossible and
>> will take weeks.)

It was more a matter of "not easily availabe on my laptop while hacking"

>> IE 5 on the Mac is likely to have similar problems due to position:
>> fixed.

IE5 on the mac is an ugly, broken hack was officially discontinued by 
its vendor several years ago.

>> W3M/Lynx: Page fails to display. Problem caused by <!--[if lt IE
>> 7]> in the <HEAD>, which Lynx, and indeed anything else (other than
>> IE), will interpret as an unclosed comment. I don't know why
>> Gecko/KHTML *don't* interpret this as an unclosed comment, probably
>> a bug in their parsers.

You caught us in the middle of attempting to fix a number of the IE 
issues with http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/. That didn't work and has 
been removed.

>>
>> Anything: The close buttons on the various bits of the homepage are
>> Javascript dependent. Ideally they should do something server-side
>> to hide those bits, but you should use JS to write the close buttons
>> out so that non-JS browsers don't see them.
>

*nod*

> -- 
> Andrew Stribblehill
> Systems programmer, IT Service
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