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-James

More IE madness: Internet Explorer 7 does not support min-width for tables

Posted by james on Feb. 4, 2010

This is maddening. IE7 "supports" the CSS min-width property. I use quotes, because it truly doesn't. This works:

<style>
div {
width:80%;
min-width:500px;
}
</style>

<div>
This grows with the page, but has a minimum width too.
</div>

That's great, and very useful. But this does not work:

<style>
table {
width:80%;
min-width:500px;
}
</style>

<table>
<tr>
<td>
This is broken.
</td>
</tr>
</table>

So while IE7 supposedly supports the min-width property, it doesn't work in this situation. What a huge pain in the butt. And how completely typical for IE.

This is a quick-fix hack:

<style>
div {
width:80%;
min-width:500px;
}

table {
width:100%;
}
</style>

<div>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
This grows with the page, but has a minimum width too.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>

Since the fix is so simple, you might think this isn't that big a problem. It is. Buggy browsers are always a problem, and cost a *ton* of money. I'm sure it would be completely staggering to calculate the amount of dev hours wasted (and therefore money lost) on working around CSS bugs in IE, and that's not even considering the non-browser that is IE6.

Yet another IE bug - innerHTML of a PRE does not preserve whitespace

Posted by james on Jan. 28, 2010

I was working on Monkey Analytics when I noticed this bug:
<pre id="some-pre">This
should
appear
on
separate
lines.</pre>
This is fine, but when you do this in IE7:
<script>
document.getElementById('some-pre').innerHMTL = document.getElementById('some-pre').innerHMTL;
</script>
It strips all the whitespace out, putting everything on a single line. Why? In all other browsers, innerHTML returns the contents of a PRE. In IE7, innerHTML returns the contents with all whitespace consolidated and altered, so there are no linebreaks.

So this is yet another IE bug. What a giant pile of crap. It's hard to imagine any serious web developer voluntarily using IE to do anything.

Thanks to this blog post for confirming what I've seen.

Google Phone: Nexus One

Posted by james on Jan. 5, 2010

Oh man!
http://www.google.com/phone/

I haven't even seen this phone in person, but I'm obsessed with it. Might just be the best phone out there right now (iPhone included). We'll see (if I ever get one...).