Well, I noticed something strange today that I had not noticed before. Internet Explorer ignores the bottom margin I had set when it is the last item on the page. I had the same problem in IE 6 and 7, but not in Firefox or Safari.

To elaborate, I set a bottom margin on the last element on the page. IE ignored it and displayed the element flush with the bottom of the browser instead of showing a margin. When I added another item below it, it showed the margin, so it has something to do with being the last item on the page. This only happened in IE 6 and 7.

Solutions I thought of included setting a transparent border, increasing the height of the footer and setting padding on the body. The transparent border didn’t work in Firefox or IE. Increasing the height of the footer wouldn’t work because there was a bottom aligned background that needed to appear at a certain height. I felt that setting padding for the body was also not a good practice.

I tried everything I could think of to get around it. I ended up adding an empty div below the element and setting the height to what I wanted the margin to be. This worked. It was the best solution because all of the other things I could think of wouldn’t work because of the design constraints.

A friend of mine, David Ross, just gave me a hot tip the other day. I have a lot of problems with layout in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, usually so much so that I have to have extra IE-only styles for the builds that I do.

David told me to make sure when you use floating divs that you use display: inline for Internet Explorer. That did the trick! I have way less problems with layout in IE now thanks to this tip.

Okay, word on the street is that Internet Explorer 7 has already gained more browser market share since launching in January than Firefox currently has. This means that if you are not designing for IE 7, you should be. IE 6 still has the majority, but according to Microsoft, IE 7 is around 25% and growing. I believe this since I have actually seen statistics backing this up.

So, I am now checking all sites that I build in IE 7. And yes, I am discovering that, while IE 7 is a huge improvement over IE 6, it still has problems rendering CSS. So much so that on my latest project, I had to create 2 IE only stylesheets, one for IE 6 and one for IE 7.

If you are using Firefox, which I hope you are, you may know about the web developer toolbar for Firefox. This is an extension for Firefox that gives you tools to easily debug all kinds of problems with web pages. Today I found a similar tool to help debug IE 7 display problems.

IE 7 copied many of it’s new features from Firefox, including the ability to add third party plug-ins called add-ons. You can find a directory of these add-ons here. The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is similar to the web developer toolbar for Firefox. It is not nearly as easy to use or as functional, but it has many of the same functions and can be useful for debugging in IE 7. It is a big improvement over debugging for IE 6.

Incidentally, one thing I noticed is that while this add-on is free, Microsoft charges for many of the add-ons on this site. I saw some as high as $300. While I don’t necessarily agree with that, it could be very lucrative for developers, if you are so inclined. That is if Microsoft is sharing the revenue.

I also see how it could give Microsoft an edge over Firefox. If they are sharing revenue with developers to build extensions and Firefox is not, they could in theory build better extensions and take more market share away from Firefox. Somehow though, I don’t see many people paying for browser extensions, so maybe not.

On Tuesday of this week, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch pointed out on the TechCrunch blog that Wal-Mart had mistakes in the code of their brand new video site that prevented the CSS from loading in Firefox. The blog post has a screenshot of what it looked like. It would appear that whoever designed the site did not even check it in Firefox before launch, and reportedly the mistakes were easily fixable.

Well, today I just went to the site and found something that you will not believe. Not only has Wal-Mart not fixed the site, they put in a browser sniffer to shut all other browsers, except IE, out completely. Now if you go to the site, http://www.walmart.com/videodownloads, you see this message:

Our website requires the browser Internet Explorer version 6 or higher. It appears that you are using Firefox, Safari, or another browser that Wal-Mart Video Downloads doesn’t currently support.

So, rather than fix their mistake, which was apparently easily fixable, they decide to just say screw it and support no other browsers except Microsoft? I guess I should expect this from them, but come on. Wal-Mart is not living in the stone ages here. They are trying to compete with the likes of Netflix and iTunes. This is in effect a slap in the face to Firefox and Safari users, who in fact just might be the types of people that would use an online video downloading service, the very people you would think they would be trying to target.

Maybe the question we should be asking here is Wal-Mart somehow in bed with Microsoft on this?

Update: It appears Wal-Mart has taken the site down altogether. Now if you go to the site it says,

Site Temporarily Unavailable
The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Please try again later.

It looks like all this attention provoked some action on their part. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Update 2: Now it’s back to what it said at first when you look at it in Firefox.

Unsupported Browser
We’re sorry …
Our website requires the browser Internet Explorer version 6 or higher. It appears that you are using Firefox, Safari, or another browser that Wal-Mart Video Downloads doesn’t currently support. Click here to get Internet Explorer for free from Microsoft.

Thank You

Good CSS designers know that one of the faults of Internet Explorer 6 is that it doesn’t recognize the CSS property position: fixed. This is a CSS property which allows one element on a page to remain stationary while the other element scrolls, resembling frames in a browser.

Our company launched a web site for Ty Pennington last fall. For this site, the footer, along with the transparent logo at the bottom of every page, not only needed to be stationary, but also always needed to align at the bottom of the page no matter how long the content or the browser window. This is a desgin challenge for any CSS designer.

Luckily, I found a kickass CSS hack that not only allowed me to simulate position: fixed in IE but also solve the other problem I had by always keeping the footer at the bottom of the page. It worked perfectly, but it currently breaks in IE 7. It may be fixable, but I haven’t taken a look at it yet to try and fix it.

Ty Pennington is a site we are really proud of. It uses lots of other tricks with Javascript and CSS to create a beautiful, branded work of art. So go on over there to see how it was done. Also click on the example above and bookmark it so you can do this in the future.

Today, we were informed by a client that one of the sites we had been working on was not working properly. When the client went to the site, they could see the site, but it was behind a transparent white screen. We had no information on what platform or browser the client was using, but I assumed it was a compatibility issue with the Flash player.

On this particular site, it was using SlideShowPro, UFO and sIFR, all on the home page. Chris noticed that one of the slideshows was only compatible with Flash version 8. He thought if we downgraded it to 7, that would solve the issue. I agreed, but I wanted to test it first to see if we could reproduce the problem. I thought that this would help us deal with Flash player compatibility issues in the future.

I decided to look for a way to test different versions of the Flash plugin. I found the archived Flash player download page on Adobe’s web site. I recommend bookmarking this page. You will need to download these plugins if you want to test different Flash player versions in your browsers. I had a problem though. I could only get the players to install in Firefox. I couldn’t install any of those plugins in Internet Explorer.

So I installed Flash player version 7 in Firefox. When I viewed the site, it was obvious that was causing the problem. Don’t ask me how the client had Flash player version 7 still on their browser. That seems to be about par for the course around here. Anyway, downgrading the slideshow to version 7 fixed the problem, and the site is now compatible with Flash 7. Voila!

In researching this problem though, I came across another neat little tool, called Plugin Switcher, that I recommend you try out. Right now, it is only compatible with Windows. But, it allowed me to install as many versions of the Flash plugin as I wanted and switch between them on the fly.

Plugin Switcher claims to let you switch between Active X plugins also but I could not activate that feature. As a result, it only worked in Firefox for me, however it did that perfectly. There is a free version and a paid version. I only tried the free version. I contacted the developer to find out how much the full version is since most of the site is in German. If I ever try out the full version, I will post again, and let you know what I think.