Topic: W3C Compliant HTML and IE 7

Whilst Microsoft's Internet Explorers 5 and 6 were fairly easygoing pieces of browser software which usually displayed web pages reasonably correctly irrespective of W3C compliant HTML, the same cannot be said about their successor. Indeed, like Mozilla Firefox, the new version 7 flavors of Internet Explorer seem to be rather more discriminating when it comes to displaying HTML code. This becomes especially apparent when one is looking at a page constructed from old style layers (div tags) such as the ones cranked out by Dreamweaver MX and its contemporaries.

It should be said that Maryland website design is not in fact referring to table-less designs where the HTML code simply specifies a div id and leaves all formatting issues to the CSS; I am talking about old style div tags such as the one below:

[div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; left:350px; top:225px; width:550px;
height:794px; z-index:4"]Whatever content[/div]

Please note: < > brackets have been changed to [ ] brackets so the code can be displayed on this page. The above approach was (and in a lot of cases still is) a firm favorites with many less experienced web designers using earlier versions of Dreamweaver and its ilk without any clear appreciation of W3C compliant HTML or the long-term implications of launching web sites with improperly formatted code.

In any case, whilst Internet Explorer in its version 5 and 6 incarnations was the undisputed king of web browsers, issues related to improperly formatted HTML did not generally come back to haunt the designer after his or her site went live, but with the advent and increasing popularity of Firefox user complaints about text overlap, collapsed page layout and other on-screen formatting issues became an annoying part of life for many designers employing the traditional div tag approach

(Edited by poi on 07-10-2008 10:54)