[WWdevel] OL problem on MSIE

[Michael G. <ga...@ma...>]

On Feb 5, 2005, at 1:22 AM, John Jones wrote:

> Michael Gage wrote:
>
>> This change may be our best bet -- although I admit I'm rather 
>> irritated at the thought of reinventing
>> an HTML concept -- the ordered list -- in order to keep our problems 
>> compatible with IE. Can
>> anyone get Davide's suggestion to work? adding </li> at the ends of 
>> the lines. That is even better
>> conformance to HTML standards, so that would be a better fix. 
>> Otherwise lets go with your change John.
>
> I just tried Davide's suggestion and it didn't work with IE.
>
(sigh) oh well.  The only variable I can think of is fooling around 
with the {zoom} command in the CSS, according
to Arnie if that is not there then the OL lists work ok. Is there 
another way to fix the peekaboo bug?
  Also it seems that using OL lists without specifying the letters
works OK, so perhaps there is an alternate way to specify letters 
instead of numbers in OL lists that works with MSIE?

I'd really like to use the existing HTML structures if at all possible 
-- reinventing them is not a good long term principle,
but for our limited needs of the construct we may need to do it anyway.

One other comment, if we do change the current code, or even if we 
don't, I think we should factor out the second stretch of code
that redefines an OL list and call the original OL subroutine instead.  
What ever we decide I don't see any reason why the
code needs to appear in two places.

Thanks for looking into this, John.
>> For what it's worth the Mac IE doesn't seem to have a problem with 
>> this ordered list structure. It does
>> have other problems however -- it takes for every to render a long 
>> list of problems in the Library browser
>> for example.
>
> Is this in comparison to other browsers, or is the server in 
> generating the page?
>
This is in comparison to other browsers.  When I used the Library 
Browser to check the OL bug on the Mac IE
it took many tens of seconds for the full table to come up ** using 
jsMath mode**. It kept coming up in jerks, blanking
out completely and then coming back.  I think the screen blanks as the 
javaScript is rendered.  It takes a while to
load in image mode, but you don't get the disconcerting effect of 
having the browser blank out and then come back.

In other browsers the blanking effect doesn't occur, but it takes a 
while for the javaScript to run down the page and change the
raw TeX into symbols.  This is only apparent on long HTML pages -- on a 
typical one problem page both the Mac IE and
the other browsers perform fine -- at least on my hardware.

All of this is browser related, it has little if anything to do with 
the server.

Take care,

Mike

> John
>