Page Flickering & Disappearing (??)

[kuau]

I redid a site ( http://www.carrentalhawaii.com/ ) in pure css in November (with help from John Scheuer - thank you John!), but had to put the old pages (hard-coded with tables) back up when customers reported that the page would flicker and disappear. I cannot see this effect because I am using IE7 and FF and it apparently happens only in older IE versions. Now that the holidays are over, I tried putting the css'd pages up again to see if I could resolve the issue & received one report yesterday of the flickering. Apparently it happened on the home page and the 4 island pages and she was unable to enter a reservation.

Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? I spoke with the woman and she was using the Yahoo version of IE?? and she said when she tried later it was OK. I'm wondering if there is some kind of <!-- If IE < 7... > I can put in the head to prevent this anomaly from happening, but it is difficult when I cannot even see it. I've experienced odd things with css being cured by clearing the cache, but if that is what is needed, do you put a little note on the page telling people to do that? How is such an issue handled?

I really want to ditch the old pages once and for all but cannot if the client thinks he is losing customers because of the css. Any words from the wise would be much appreciated. Mahalo, erin

[Master_script_maker]

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html

[kuau]

Dear MSM: OK, I read the whole page and it would appear that, IF it is something that can be fixed for IE versions earlier than IE7, then I would put this in the head section:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
some instructions<br />
<![endif]-->

Problem is that I have no idea what versions of IE experience the problem OR how to fix it if I did. I have never personally seen the problem. Any ideas? erin

[techno_race]

I use IE7, but I do know that absolute positioning can be a problem in earlier versions of IE. Try using relative positioning if you have any instances of absolute positioning.

[Medyman]

As far as not being able to see the problem...

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

It's a good idea to test your sites in as many browsers as you can (at the very least IE 6, 7 and FF) when developing a website.

[kuau]

I didn't use absolute positioning anywhere; pretty much everything is floated.

I am running Vista and it says Multiple IE won't work under Vista, and everything I read sounded really scary. I would very much like to be able to see the pages in IE6 but not at the risk of destroying my OS or disabling IE7. In other words, I'm afraid to mess with it. But it's a great idea for XP... thanks. I was hoping someone had IE6 and could check it for me. If it affects only one person in 100,000, then I won't worry about it. I considered putting the form section back within a table, thinking that perhaps this was caused by it not being structured within a table. Not sure what to do at this point. Has anyone had this problem before? Mahalo, erin

[Medyman]

hmm...yeah, you don't want to destroy your OS. That would not be good...

I fired up my multiple IE install and in IE6 I replicate the glitch each time...so it doesn't just seem random.

The "flickering" happens that the rental form show in it's intented position and then shifts to below the sidebar. And the page isn't "disappearing" as much as moving further down the page.

I didn't look at your CSS but my assumption is that it's a problem with a float. Maybe reduce the widths by a little.

Screenshot:

[kuau]

Dear MM: Yikes, thanks for clearing up the mystery! So is that happening to every single person who is using IE6?! So does the page look normal when you first open it and then it suddenly shifts the divs lower? I'll try adjusting some of the div sizes and see if that helps. Thanks so much for the feedback.

Mahalo, erin