Absolute positioning causes IE highlighting bug

They have: 222 posts

Joined: Sep 1999

A few of us are redesigning our church's website and are running into trouble with absolute positioning in CSS causing extra text on a given page to be selected when any text is. I've run across this a lot before, but have never found a solution. I've only been able to find a little info on the bug (here and here), but no solutions. You can see the bug occuring on our development site. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Renegade's picture

He has: 3,022 posts

Joined: Oct 2002

The only solution would be to use relative positioning. IE messess up "anything" and "everything"

They have: 222 posts

Joined: Sep 1999

That's not true, http://www.rvmountainvillage.com/ and http://www.medxstream.com/default.htm both use absolute positioning and don't get the error.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

I'm not sure, but in general using tables + absolute positioning causes problems. For layout, you may want to choose one or the other, not both.

You have a very complex site. I'm not using a browser that would duplicate your problem, however, I suspect that you have other issues brought on my mixing inline, local, global stylesheets, HTML positioning + CSS positioning and more.

They have: 222 posts

Joined: Sep 1999

It's only an IE bug. We tried doing a pure CSS layout at first but it wasn't working the way we hoped so we had to compromise with the current mixture of tables and CSS. We're only having a few minor bugs with using multiple stylesheets (some of the link colors being wrong, for instance), but we haven't spent a lot of time trying to fix them yet so we may get them resolved.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

When you're working on it, try not to use both DIV and TABLE for positioning. Additionally, try to keep everything possible in the global style sheet, that will help troubleshooting.

If you're using absolute positioning, DO NOT use HTML for positioning or sizes! It really does muck things up.

Wherever possible, use ONE stylesheet, not multiple. It's possible to hide damaging code from various browsers, and that's preferred to maintaining browser-specific stylesheets.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

And, naturally, as soon as I say it, there is an exception: http://tantek.com/CSS/Examples/midpass.html

For IE5.0 and 5.5 -- this will correct any stupidity on their part and allow lower and higher browsers free access to the single stylesheet... Smiling

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