September 29, 2005

Dropdowns and IE/Mac CSS Hack

The drop-down menus are becoming a rather large frustration. What little time I've had these past few weeks has gone into continuing to develop the drop-down menus. Getting IE/Mac to play along has been an interesting bit of research. I've found that whitespace is needed before the opening UL and after the closing UL tags, otherwise IE/Mac sticks some whitespace below the parent list item when you hover over it. And IE/Mac requires widths set on all floating elements, whereas virtually every other browser will default to an automatically calculated width based on the content of the float.

So be it.

Netscape 6.x will not work with the drop-downs (at least not in my first attempt). But this isn't a big concern since not even the CSS drop-down menu example does not work with Netscape 6.x.

I've got drop-downs working exactly as I want, looking the same, in IE 5.0 and later, Netscape 7, Gecko 1 and later (firefox/mozilla), Safari, Opera 6 and later, and that's it. I'll look at iCab (never did before, but I've now got iCab 3 beta to test with) later.

So now I look at IE/Mac.

IE/Mac and Hack

Long story short, I get things working in IE/Mac 5.2. Dropdowns work, they look fine, hooray. I fire up IE/Mac 5.1 (OS 9) to have a look and things aren't doing so well.

I'm not even trying to get the CSS to work with IE/Mac 5.1 right now, I want to just hide the popups alltogether and I'll figure out if it's possible to work around IE 5.1 later.

Well hell, that approach turned into just as much work on its own.

How do I hide CSS from IE/Mac 5.1 but keep it visible in IE/Mac 5.2?

Well, after a lot of mucking about, I've come up with something.

I'd like any/all IE/Mac users to try this out and make sure it's working as intended.

It's a mish-mash of the same IE/Mac backslash hack applied in different ways. It requires 3 copies of the same rule with different hacks applied to 2 of the 3 lines in order to get things working. It's a bit cumbersome, but it works.

I really would love to hear from anyone who knows of any other solutions to hiding CSS from IE/Mac 5.1 (and assuming 5.0 as well) but still applied in IE/Mac 5.2.

Thanks.

Posted by Ruthsarian at 01:11 PM | Comments (2)

Comments

Not to dismiss the work, but does IE5 Mac really merit the concern at this point? http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm and other places would indicate that it is past its, if not useful, then used life. -Sud. Posted by: Sudrien at September 29, 2005 07:49 PM
Hi Sud, My answer would be yes. There is a small, but very strong user base that stick to the old OS 9 and earlier Macs. If they haven't switched by now, they aren't going to switch. They use either Netscape 4 or IE/Mac 5.1 or 5.0. They're probably going to be around for at least a few more years. The OS/X IE/Mac users might also be sticking around since MS has put a halt to all future development of IE on the Mac platform. It would seem quite likely that there are some who will have grown up with IE/Mac and stick to it out of habing and knowing it's usage. Sure, Safari is right there to pick up the slack, but you'd be surprised how stubborn Mac users can get. :) Posted by: Ruthsarian at September 30, 2005 09:20 AM

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