Re: From the anonymator: Firefox/IE7 tech question

This is hard to diagnose without code or screenshots, but...

The expanding box problem is caused by content that is too wide to fit
in the space allocated to its container. Check those two pages for long
URLs in the text, wide images, or other things that don't wrap.

Are your floated divs dropping down? You could have a sort of cascade
effect: the content in one div is too wide, so it forces the other div
to shrink, but the content in that div can't fit in the smaller space,
so it drops down below. The fact that you haven't specified widths for
the floated divs is immaterial.

See "Position Is Everything" for a writeup on this bug:

http://positioniseverything.net/explorer/expandingboxbug.html

They say that IE7 is not subject to the bug - not sure about that - and
they suggest setting the overflow property or using an IE-specific word
wrap property with conditional comments.

I would also double-check Firefox to make sure that content is not being
clipped.

Good luck! Feel free to email off-list if you need more information.

Caroline

Debra Goldentyer wrote:
> THIS POSTING HAS BEEN ANONYMATED. PLEASE REPLY TO THE WHOLE LIST OR SEND TO
> ME FOR FORWARDING.
>
>
>
>
> Fellow web editors, please give me your input!
>
> I am working on a website which works just fine in Firefox (of course)
> and until today it has worked correctly in IE7. But I was adding
> content today and two pages, and only two pages, are suffering from the
> "expanding box problem" according to my validator. Thing is, while
> there is a <div> which wraps the whole page and has a fixed width, there
> are no set widths for the internal <div>s and they are floated.
>
> Why would this happen to only two pages when the whole site shares one
> stylesheet and I haven't manually changed anything style-wise on these
> pages, only the content? While I would like to write this off to IE
> gremlins, I need this to work. What do I do to fix this? And maybe more
> importantly, anyone have any ideas as to what I did to cause this?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
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Received on Tue Nov 04 2008 - 11:15:21 PST