A Blue Dot in the Fires of Hell
Through the choking, burning smoke rising slowly from the lowest pits of Hell, you can just make out a faint blue dot, swimming amongst the twisted, glowing flames of Satan’s Lair. You keep your gaze, and as you look longer, you see the soft bevel, the over-used gradient and it hits you – it’s Internet Explorer!All right, even though I don’t truly believe a piece of software can go to Hell, I do wish it could. I just stumbled upon a fix for an age-old IE problem I’ve never been able to conquer. The problem is known to some as the IE clear:both bug. Reason being, when you use clear:both on an element it will sometime (and I stress “sometime” to the furthest extent of the word) make pieces of text in *other* elements disappear. And the best part is that when you get the flicker, the flicker is unpredictable… some times it will get rid of h1s, other times it will just take out chunks of divs (including their background images).I’ve been dealing with and working around this problem for at least two years and I am happy to say I think I know how to deal with it – mostly. In the link I posted above, Alex Mauzon found that you could add position:relative to the container that was being screwed up and it would fix it. I ended up having to just put it on all my divs (thankfully I had no position:absolutes, but they should have taken precedent). Anywho, I beat it. So take that IE! And if I ever see a blue dot floating in the fiery pits of Hell, I’ll be sure to chuckle.Update (05.16.2006): In using this hack, I found that in some cases it created bizarre behavior in Gecko-browsers for some floated elements. So, at least in one case, I used the star html (* html ) hack considering IE was the only problem. And I should reiterate, this hack has been a breath of fresh air on my late-night coding sessions.