Display/Render problem with IE5 on a Mac

December 7, 2004 3:21 PM

IE5 Mac bug (I think): A site I am working on looks fine on all platforms except IE 5.2 Mac. Basically, it adds space around [p] elements and inside [td] elements which shouldn't be there, and misinterprets selectors in baffling ways.
Is there a well known way to fix this kind of behavior other than saying 'to hell with it'?
posted by signal to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

IE for mac screws everything up; you're probably going to have to either say screw it, or offer an alternative style sheet using something like the IE 5 comment hack.
posted by cmyr at 3:30 PM on December 7, 2004

odd. link.
posted by cmyr at 3:31 PM on December 7, 2004

>Basically, it adds space around [p] elements and inside [td] elements which shouldn't be there

Yes, it does, and I finally just said "the hell with that." I am not a web guru, but I don't think I lot of Mac people are using IE. If it renders in Safari and Firefox your Mac clientelle will be happy.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:45 PM on December 7, 2004

Wolfdog, that depends on what the demographics of that Mac clientele are. There are still plenty of people (in schools, say) running Mac OS 9, and neither Safari nor Firefox is available for OS 9.

Some of IE/Mac's rendering issues depend on the DOCTYPE you've specified. If you've got an XHTML doctype, then, yeah, you should probably just say "the hell with it" and move on, regardless of the effect on some Mac users (even though I think that's not a negligible number of people).
posted by macrone at 4:06 PM on December 7, 2004

Two things.

Problems are often caused by whitespace around tags;

<p>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

is not the same as;

<p><table><tr><td></td></tr></table>

Second, no Mac user where I work has objected to the suggestion to download and install the latest version of Mozilla.
posted by krisjohn at 4:44 PM on December 7, 2004

it isn't really a matter of personal preference I would suggest, krisjohn; I have two grandparents who're using os 9 on g4s because they don't feel it's worth it to them to upgrade to X, and I think that's the sort of demographic that you're going to see with most people using ie5. If you say to hell with it then that's fine and all, but remember ie 5.2 is still the primary browser for the majority of people using os 9.
posted by cmyr at 4:50 PM on December 7, 2004

Unless your clientele has a sizeable minority (or heaven forbid, majority) of OS9 users, then it is always best to just say 'screw IE/Mac'. The browser is just too buggy otherwise and your time is far, far better spent ironing out any remaining bugs in the other browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE6, etc).

This is mostly my personal opinion, although the place I've been employed at for a few months now doing web interface engineering has a semi-official policy like this--make sure the page is functional in IE/Mac, but any cosmetic issues are a non-priority unless a client specifically needs it.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 6:02 PM on December 7, 2004

it is always best to just say 'screw IE/Mac'. The browser is just too buggy

It's always best to not say "always." IE5 Mac has some serious issues compared to this generation of browsers, but to call it "too buggy" is unfair. At the time, it supported CSS like no other browser out there. cmyr showed how to remedy this problem in the first comment, but kinda bungled the link. All you need to do is tweak the CSS to get the Mac looking right and then override it all back to the right CSS inside the comment hack. I would also look at whitespace, as suggested above.
posted by yerfatma at 4:10 AM on December 8, 2004

IE5 mac is gob-smackingly buggy. I'm not sure it can even be called a browser, more a markup-chewing monster.

Anyway, maybe your problem is related to the first bug listed on this page?
posted by influx at 6:55 AM on December 8, 2004