Please Microsoft, Kill IEs 5 and 6

Monday, December 12, 2005, at 11:45AM

By Eric Richardson

If I wasn't sick all ready, trying to understand Internet Explorer's rendering would probably make me ill. Sometime after I launched the changed up sidebar styles on blogdowntown a few weeks ago I noticed that IE put a really ugly amount of padding between the list elements, against my express instructions not to. And today I notice that IE makes the archive page I was so proud of a couple days ago render like crap.

I hate IE. I found a solution to the first problem, though.

Update (6:05pm): Found a way around the second, as well as an annoying sidebar margin issue.

If I put the following style on the li items:

margin: 0;
padding: 0;

IE puts padding in there regardless.

I noticed, though, that if I put a 1px border on an item, magically the ugly padding disappeared. That got me thinking, and finally I tried putting a 1px padding in. It worked.

That's the dumbest solution I've ever seen, but whatever. 1px is better than like 10px.

About the archives, I ended up just having to put a width on the div that I'm floating everything in. Apparently otherwise IE just decided to let things wander wherever they pleased.

I also fixed the margins on the sidebar, by realizing it was an instance of the IE doubled float-margin bug. One "display: inline" added and things do indeed look better.