One of my recent projects has the luxury of only requiring support for IE6 (and Mozilla, natch). This is a rare occurrence, since most clients require support for least a version or two back (and justifiably so). However, in this case, a web application in another portion of the website (contracted to another vendor) already required IE6, so that support cascaded to the rest of the site.
Coding for such recent browsers is a bit surreal, in a way — all of a sudden, I can write standards compliant code and there’s a good chance it could work work without fiddling ;). Along those lines, I decided to check on new CSS support that may have been introduced into IE6. Generally, I wouldn’t give much thought to the workings of such a recent browser, but such knowledge could be useful to me this time.
So, after briefly searching Google, I found this MSDN Library article on CSS Enhancements in IE6. I was already aware of several of the features, such as IE6’s support for the CSS box model (in short, the CSS spec states that padding is added to an element’s width, and IE versions before 6 ignored this).
I was also pleased to see that IE6 includes some useful bits such as support for min-height (you can specify the minimum height on an element). Interestingly enough, the article didn’t mention min-width, which I would think they could have implemented at the same time (or, should have been). Perhaps most amusing to me, though, is that IE6 only now supports padding on images. How is it that image-padding slipped under their radar for so long?
I’m a little disappointed that a handcoding site with an article that talks about writing compliant CSS code would have an error in their stylesheet and thier XHTML not check as valid either.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.handcoding.com%2F
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.handcoding.com%2Fstyles-site.css&warning=1&profile=css2&usermedium=all
I’m really not trying to troll you, though my remarks might seem negative. I can appreciate you taking pride in writing valid code and thought you would want to know. I check all my pages before I upload them to make sure they’re valid and more often than not I need to correct something.
I don’t have a problem with IE6 displaying my CSS as it should, Firebird is another matter.
My blog
Thanks for pointing that out. The HTML error was a missed semicolon and it turns out that the CSS error was inherent to the Movable Type templates (both are fixed now).
“I don’t have a problem with IE6 displaying my CSS as it should, Firebird is another matter.”
I’m sure Alex (or I) would be happy to help you get your CSS behaving in Gecko. Generally that’s much easier than making IE behave.