Tag: IE

CSS Rounds Corners in Firefox, But Not in IE8

Firefox/Mozilla browsers are gaining shares of the browser market and for good reason. Upbeat features let the user take complete control of their browsing experience, which is one main reason behind their gaining popularity. Add-On tools can help most any website developer to see that their site is put together in a valid way and that has pushed Firefox use among developers to probably a very high level. I still have yet to hear another web developer state that they prefer IE over Firefox, and I’m pretty sure that all of us have cursed IE6!

Firefox also champions the use of future CSS, which are CSS features that will only be seen by IE users at some time in the future. Ok, I made that up, but since Internet Explorer is playing the catchup game, I think it’s only fitting to point out an example.

Looking at some CSS basics…we have a way to draw a box around some content. It’s called the border property. The top, left, right and bottom sides of the box can be assigned diferent values for the width, style and color. Each of these values can be assigned separately or all at once.

Separately:

.box {
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #000;
}

All together, in the order width, style, color:

.box {
border: 1px solid #d1d1d1;
}

If you want to have different widths, styles or colors for your box, then you’ll have to use the properties that target each side, like so:

.box {
border-left: 1px dashed #000;
border-right: 2px solid #5ca3b7;
border-top: 1px dashed #000;
border-bottom: 2px solid #5ca3b7;
}

That’s nice, but sometimes we really don’t want the square boxy look. Rounded corners are nice, aren’t they? Well, our Firefox users can see rounded corners for the same box that we’ve built for our menu. All we have to do is add one property to the menu, called the -moz-border-radius, and specify its size. IE simply ignores this property, so those boxes will show pointed corners.

.roundedbox {
-moz-border-radius:10px;
}

The 10 pixel radius is the size of the rounded corner. We probably want to add a little padding to the menu box so the content isn’t smashed against the border, so we’ll set that at 10 px, too.

Here’s a menu box that will show rounded corners in Firefox/Mozilla browsers:

.roundedbox {
border:1px solid #5ca3b7;
padding:10px;
-moz-border-radius:10px;
}

There are ways to get the rounded corner look in IE browsers, but it’s a bit more work. For now, we’ll continue to use the -moz-border-radius property in appreciation of our Firefox users.

Wrapper Div Not A Full Page with Firefox But Looks Right in IE7

Errors inevitably find their way into your files while you’re developing new themes or basically while doing anything with CSS.

Once an error is fixed jot down a note as to how you got the look you were going for and that in itself should help you remember what you did correctly. So, here’s a CSS tip for myself and maybe a few other developers interested in creating WordPress themes.

I was checking out how a border would look around the whole page and this error became obvious. Maybe not an error per se, but the output was not the same between Firefox 2.0 (Fx) and Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7) so something needed to be fixed.

Problem was that the wrapper div, which should hold everything between the opening and closing body tags, did not extend all the way down the page to envelope the footer in Fx, but it looked as expected in IE7. I could tell there was a difference in output between the two browsers because I used <border: 2px solid #f00;> in the css stylesheet for #wrapper. That should have put a bright red rectangle around the wrapper, and in essence the entire WP page.

firefox-needs-clear

Firefox 2.0 didn’t let the #wrapper div enclose the entire page. Notice the red line at the top of the image and the dark grey background for the post.

firefox-needs-clear-ie7-doesnt

IE 7 filled the page as expected without the use of a clearing div. Notice the red box around everything and the lighter color to the post.

Divs were properly closed as the XHTML code grabbed from View Source validated ok.

The solution I found was to insert a spacer clearing div just after the end of the footer div. Somehow that forced the #wrapper to go all the way to the bottom of the page in Firefox.

New CSS entry:

.spacer {
clear: both !important;
}

New XHTML entry added at end of footer.php:

<div class="spacer"> </div>

Now, for the time being everything looks identical between Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.