# Internet Explorer rendering incorrectly



## HelpHelp99 (Dec 16, 2007)

This thread is for developers and designers who struggle with getting things to render properly in IE 7.0. This happens randomly, sporadically, and usually only once. A refresh fixes it. But elements appear all over the page, improperly, and its become a MAJOR problem for us. I can't have a professional website that renders like this with over 2 million people visiting every year. Please help if you guys have any idea why its doing this or have heard of any fixes or types of coding that help restrict it.


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## KoosHopeloos (Nov 3, 2004)

@ HelpHelp99: Welcome to TSF!

Can you provide a link for to check the source code?


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## DonaldG (Aug 23, 2007)

The URL is in the image above

http://www.folliclone.com/hair-loss-news/article298.php

It renders perectly in IE7 & Firefox 2.0.0.7

Does the problem you state, only happen on your machine or have visitors or clients complained. If it is only on your machine, then you could have a 'hijack' problem... It may be worth while taking the FIVE STEPS as shown in the Hijack section of this forum.

Other than that, I can not see much wrong (other than to add a few more meta tags for the SEs and certainly more than 4 'key words') Try adding bald, baldy, slap head, skinhead, etc and dont forget to add the common spelling mistakes for the keywords too...

BTW: Your Apache Server is showing its nickers on the home page:
http://www.folliclone.com
You need to add or reinstate a 'home.html' or 'index.html' page in the site root/pub directory :wink:

Also: with a claimed 2 million visitors, I would certainly finish the 'Contact Us' page. No name - no email - no real address - no telephone number...
You must give the visitor confidence that he is dealing with an ethical company, not just a another website...


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## HelpHelp99 (Dec 16, 2007)

DonaldG said:


> It renders perectly in IE7 & Firefox 2.0.0.7


Unfortunately no. It doesn't render perfectly in IE7. As mentioned, this is random, sporadic, usually on the very first load of the page, and does not always happen, but has happened enough that its a concern. You may not see it, but this is IE 7 you are looking at in the screen cap I provided.



> Does the problem you state, only happen on your machine or have visitors or clients complained.


It happens on other people's machines also.



> BTW: Your Apache Server is showing its nickers on the home page:
> http://www.folliclone.com
> You need to add or reinstate a 'home.html' or 'index.html' page in the site root/pub directory :wink:


Assume we're smart  We know all this. Its intentional. We know the browser version and we've fully verified, and checked and rechecked - senior programmers. Everyone here has the basics down, dont worry  This domain is a temp. location for a redesign and we dont want it indexed by search engines yet. Thus the lack of home page. 



> Also: with a claimed 2 million visitors, I would certainly finish the 'Contact Us' page. No name - no email - no real address - no telephone number...
> You must give the visitor confidence that he is dealing with an ethical company, not just a another website...


Again, no offense, but please lets focus on the reported problem. We are designing a new site. This isnt the live site, and yes, we get about 2.5 million visitors a year. Thanks for the additional input however.

This is a problem / bug with iE. There is no two questions about it. What I would like to know is if our code could be written any differently that might be more amicable to IE with its current problems. There are several different ways to program that middle table. Im thinking if we dummy it down a bit, maybe IE can handle it better. Maybe we made the code too complex. 

Any senior level programmers want to comment - that would be super.


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## KoosHopeloos (Nov 3, 2004)

@ : Checked the site with http://validator.w3.org and it gave me this warning _Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 141 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.

The error was: utf8 "\x92" does not map to Unicode_. Perhaps some rare settings in the IE browser prevent it from displaying correctly?


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## HelpHelp99 (Dec 16, 2007)

Thank you. I'll have the programmers look into this and comment. Does anyone here think this may be the reason for whats happening?

On a side note some of the ideas being tossed around: One programmer is trying to run some javascript on the page which hides the center body content table from the browser, then makes it appear to the browser, allowing (i assume) the browser to read it separately and increase the chances it will render properly. Its difficult to test this because it only seems to happen when the page is first first *first* loaded on a new system. Even clearing cache we cannot duplicate, but as soon as I have a new individual look at it, most of the time (and even then not ALL of the time) it happens. A refresh of the page immediately fixes it and it does not seem to reappear, except randomly and sporadically as you navigate about the site.

Another idea was that there are "HTML comments" in the code which may be causing this. Confusing the browser. 

Another idea is that there is an unnecessary table height tag in the code, which, if removed, may fix the problem.

Pretty much everyone is stumped. Im just thankful one of the programmers actually saw it happen on his own machine once, or I'd still be trying to prove it exists.

We're on the verge of making an official report to Microsoft about this. It just does not make any sense. If anyone can provide any input we'd really appreciate it. The site is supposed to go live Jan 1....


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## HelpHelp99 (Dec 16, 2007)

doublepost


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## Sc0tt (Aug 15, 2007)

Looking at the code its clearly not valid xhtml 1.1 as decleared in the doctype. On a local validation there are 206 errors.

For example <br> is not valid xhtml. It should be <br />. 

ALL of the code needs revising or the doctype needs to be changed to something alot older, like html 4 for it to be valid. 

The error kooshopeloos found is at the end of this line in the text "inhibition of 5-alpha-reductase activity in both cell-free and whole cell assays in vitro.�" << that question mark is causing the error (appears as a square in DW).

As for the so called IE problems I haven't had any.


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## DonaldG (Aug 23, 2007)

HelpHelp99 said:


> Any senior level programmers want to comment - that would be super.


OK - If you don't think a qualified guy can help - I will leave you to get on by yourself...

FYI - I have been programming for since 1981, written programmes for USGS and web design for about 12 years.... I was only wanting to help.

Being rude does not get you help too quickly.

Good luck & happy Christmas


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## KoosHopeloos (Nov 3, 2004)

@ HelpHelp99: My next comments would be exactly the ones Sc0tt made... Also, I would like to add that I'm not sure why to use so many divs and why CSS is in two files and in the HTML itself. And this piece of code is making me very uphappy:


```
<a href=""><img src="/img/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" alt=""  class="ad" /></a>
```
I'm not sure if I'm the one to tell you, but we are all volunteers trying to help as DonaldG did. Please respect all expressed remarks. We can not tell how advanced a person is and we do not know what the situation is just by someone's post. Be greatfull that someone took the time to help you and gave you some suggestions!


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## HelpHelp99 (Dec 16, 2007)

Here is a brand new page with all the encoding fixed (except for one tag "ot98" which is used by the internal search tool to tell the tool not to index certain parts of the page - the problem was happening before we put this tag in).

Look at how the footer is displaying on this page. Those blue lines are the vertical lines separating the footer links, which are a white font. Scroll to the bottom:


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## Sc0tt (Aug 15, 2007)

Well done on getting the code sorted out. I still don't see any of these rendering problems either the first or this new footer problem. 

Tested with: IE7, Firefox, Opera, Netscape. On Windows XP. All looks fine.


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## KoosHopeloos (Nov 3, 2004)

@ HelpHelp99: also tested the page using IE6, Firefox, Opera, Safari on WinXP and I was not able to replicate your presented view. Which version of IE do you use and in which settings?


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