CSS in Windows Browsers?

Question

Hi,
I did a little test programing to see how CSS works. My
question is this. I have a blue box with some text written inside
of it. It's a rollover button. In OSX everything seems to work as
expected. In Windows on F.Fox and Netscape it works, but the text
is wrapping into two lines instead of coming up as one. In
Explorer, same thing with text, but when the button is clicked, and
I go back to the page with the css button, the text has
disappeared. Could someone enlighten me as to why this is
happening? Also, are there any general guidelines I should follow
with CSS?
http://easthamptonhealthcare.org/css_link_test.html
Thanks!

Answer 1

engmix wrote:
> James, thanks for that little tid bit of info! What is
up with Explorer and
> windows?
What IE/Win does with the a:active state is, in my opinion, a
dependable
behavior. If you click a link, you normally go to a new page,
so the
active state hardly matters. If you click a link to return to
the page,
the first link is no longer the active link (the link on the
other page
now is.) However, if you use the back button to return to the
page, you
have not clicked a link as such, and so the first link is
still active,
and shows whatever properties you have given a:active. You
can see this
even more clearly in a frameset where you click a link to
change a
different frame. That link is active until you click another
one. I
assume that IE/Win thought that keeping the link in the
active state
until another link is clicked on (or until you just click
somewhere else
on the page) would serve as a small UI feature by showing you
the latest
link you clicked on, just as using the visited state shows
you links you
have clicked on recently (how long ago depends on browser
settings.)
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no other browser does this,
but instead
shows the active state for fraction of a second and then
immediately
goes to the visited state. Since these browsers do this, it
is tempting
(and I was once tempted, to my confusion) to use the active
state to
simulate a kind of button-press effect by making it the same
color as
the background so it briefly disappears before reappearing as
a:visited.
I haven't found anywhere a specification about which state to
show when,
but I didn't look very hard. IE/Win's behavior makes the
most sense to
me since a link naturally seems "active" (meaning "current")
to me until
you click another one, but I don't know if IE is right or
wrong to do
so. Or if there is even a specification somewhere about this.
> Does anyone know what the statistics are of which
Browser is most used? I
> talked to one developer and she said she and others
basically ignore Explorer.
> Yes, a nice thought, but I would think that's not ideal
in the real world.
The statistics vary, but for virtually all sites, the
majority of people
out there are using IE/Win. We will have to deal with it for
years to
come. My personal site shows, however, that Firefox has made
great gains:
Internet Explorer 58%
6.0 56%
5.5 <1%
7.0 <1%
5.01 <1%
5.0 <1%
5.23 <1%
5.14 <1%
5.17 <1%
Firefox 25%
Safari 8%
Opera 7%
Mozilla 1%
Camino <1%
Netscape <1%
AppleWebKit (Generic) <1%
but this is a site whose visitors mostly come from this news
groups or
its archive (web developers) and people looking for images
via search
engines. I get very little "off the street" traffic, so the
statistics
are not at all representative of anything except the people
who come to
my site.
James M. Shook
http://www.jshook.com