Re: XHTML IE5(Mac) Problem

Nicholas R. Rinard wrote:

> I am having a problem with my DOCTYPE declaration and IE5
> Macinstoh Edition. When I specify my doctype as XHTML using a
> strick or transitional doctype declaration copied from the
> XHTML reccomendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/) my pages
> fail to render correctly.

You have empirically discovered a major departure from Mac IE 4.5.1. 
To handle both valid pages and those with markup errors, MacIE 5.0's 
new rendering engine has two modes, "strict" and "compatibility." It 
renders using one or the other based on DOCTYPEs. The only place I 
have seen this mentioned so far is in Microsoft's interview with Todd 
Fahrner [1].

> Specifically, I use the tag <<div class="center"> to center
> elements on many of my pages (which resolves in my CSS to
> "text-align: center;"). If I specify no DTD or an HTML4 DTD
> everything is fine, but when I specify an XHTML DTD the tag
> seems to be ignored.

Yes. If you want the backward "compatibility" mode, either use no 
DOCTYPE, the HTML 2 to 3.2 or the HTML 4 or 4.01 Transitional 
DOCTYPE, and do not include any reference to a DTD.

[snip]
> PS The site is at
>
> http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nrrinard/

Despite earlier MacIEs' behavior, CSS2 says 'text-align' should apply 
only to the inline contents [2] of block level elements. To produce 
the desired effect in "strict" mode, change from "text-align: 
center;" to positioning [3], something like:

.center {
   position: relative; left: 10%; width: 80%;
}

Disclaimer: I got this centering problem wrong twice during the 
MacIE5 beta test, and I suggest that you ask Microsoft for 
clarification on both it and the new rendering modes. There are two 
good places to try. Subscribe to the Mac IE Talk list by sending mail 
to <MacIE-Talk-on@lists.boingo.com> or post to the newsgroup 
<microsoft.public.inetexplorer.mac>.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/mac/IE/Testimonials/fahrner.asp
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#propdef-text-align
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#relative-positioning

By the way, www-html-editor is for feedback to editors. You might 
want to keep in mind the newsgroup 
<comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html> for authoring questions and the 
www-html list for questions and feedback on the HTML and XHTML 
specifications.

Best wishes,
-- 
Susan Lesch
Intern, W3C

Received on Thursday, 6 April 2000 03:04:08 UTC