Robertdot, A Web Design Blog

I try to avoid Internet Explorer 7, or IE7 for short, but I can’t any more. Today was the first time I really had to debug in IE7 and I discovered a pretty irritating bug.

What I wanted to do was put a h2 inside of a div and adjust the margin-top so that it was hanging over the top edge of the div. Imagine a fieldset with a legend.

My code and style sheet were something like this:

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<style type="text/css">
div {
	border:1px dashed black;
	background-image:url(../images/sect_bg.png);
	padding:10px;
	margin-bottom:25px;
	clear:both;
}
h2 {
	display:block;
	width:100%;
	height:53px;
	background-repeat:no-repeat;
	background-position:center center;
	margin-top:-33px !important;
	text-align:center;
	background-image:url(../images/blog_title.png);
}
h2 span {
	position:absolute;
	margin-left:-9999px;
}
</style>
<div>
 <h2><span>Heading</span></h2>
 <p>Some Text</p>
</div>

In IE7, nothing happened. In every other browser, the heading moved up. I started playing with the style sheet, removing parts. It turns out that the height and width were the problem. This applied not only to my image replacement, but a plain-old div-with-a-heading-in-it. The fix for my problem was to create a separate IE7 style sheet with the following:

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h2{
	width:auto;
	height:auto;
	padding-top:53px;
}

I was also informed today that my Internet Explorer 6 Virtual PC image had expired. As promised, Microsoft has released a new Virtual PC image. While it’s nice to be able to check against Internet Explorer 6, this refresh cycle isn’t very convenient.