My site on Internet Explorer 8: What a mess

Question

I have a Windows 7 with service pack 1, and Internet Explorer 10. And I have my site, http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/ . It looks great on Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. For starters, I wanted to test how my site looks using IETester, and it's a mess (please compare by clicking the link above):

The thing is, I think that maybe the issue could be that IE8 doesn't load well from <object> tags, is that it? I use three object tags to load the three white parts: header, vertical menu, and "site log" (you can see them here: http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/header.html , http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/verticalmenu.html , http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/thesitelog.html)

To load those three sites, I use the following code:

This one for the header, <object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/header.html" width="100%" height=185></object>

This one for the menu, <object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/verticalmenu.html" height=484 width=100%></object>

And this one for the log, <center><object type="text/html" data="http://www.gfcf14greendream.com/thesitelog.html" height=600 width="90%"></object></center>

Please let me know if anyone has any ideas concerning this "mess". Thank you!!

Answer 1

This isn't a real answer (It's a quick and careless answer at best, so don't take it too seriously)

But I just thought I'd mention that the the W3C markup validator might be useful to you if you don't already know about it.. It catches bad markup practices or errors on your page and can give you more information on how to fix them. At the time of writing, your front page alone has 10 errors and 3 warnings on it. Maybe this could point you in the right direction?

upon a quick skim of your page you don't seem to be utilising CSS properly. That is to say, that I see you are using css but you have elements on your page (use of <center> HTML tags, inline styling and things like that) that go against the grain of why CSS was invented.

If you haven't already seen the CSS zen garden, take a quick read/look at it. It should set you right on why we use CSS instead of tables and alignment tags.

(People sometimes don't get this immediately, but , click the links on the right in the zen garden. The same HTML and page content are completely restyled using one html file and seperate CSS sheets)

Good luck!

Edit:

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that internet explorer 8 doesn't have much (if at all) HTML5 compatibility. If you want to develop websites and web apps in HTML5 you'll be hard pressed to serve your I.E 8 visitors and may end up spending more time fixing bugs than you are developing the content.

Some developers are already boycotting I.E 8 entirely to usher in the new era of the web with HTML5 and CSS 3. There are a few js compatibility libraries out there (like excanvas for the new <canvas> element for example) but they don't work flawlessly and you will eventually have to draw the line somewhere. (lol. canvas.. draw line.. get it?) That being said, i did find this article and this may be useful to you:

turn-on-html5-in-ie8-or-lower

Not every website requires HTML5 and it's new technologies, but if you plan on using it for things like the <canvas> tag, Id suggest (from my own personal opinion) you forget about I.E 8 and concentrate on browsers that utilise it.

Remember that you can make checks in your HTML to see what browser version your visitor is using. You can see if they are using an incompatible browser, and if so, you can then alert them that their software is out of date and suggest to them alternatives (such as chrome or firefox)

There's a bunch of tutorials on-line about this, here's the first decent looking one I found in a quick Google search this article covers using this technique for seperate CSS sheets but there are others that talk about the problem I mentioned in more depth and I'm sure you can probably figure out how to do it anyway once you read the article.

Either way, I'd say you've got a little bit of reading ahead of you to understand why your humble website does not work in an increasingly obsolete browser.

Again, good luck to you in your future endeavours.

Answer 2

Edit was too harsh:

Having looked a the site I would start by suggesting in future you think about design from a users perspective - the colour scheme you're using isn't very friendly on the eye, the red text against the green is particular troublesome to people with red/green color blindness, you also should consider how your content is presented.

End Edit:

However, regarding your IE issues.

First things first, with any work is getting a firm plan of what you hope to achieve and setting a good groundwork before starting. With HTML that means leveling the playing field with regard to browser quirks, and to achieve that, you use a reset css file.

This ensures that all browsers (as close as possible) behave in more or less the same way, regarding padding, spacing, line heights etc, and can go along way to prevent these sort of problems from happening, and allow you to achieve consitancy.

There's more info at the link below.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Secondly your HTML version - your declaring HTML5 but then use HTML4 values and attributes - basically your site (as pointed out above) is not valid markup.