Recently I wrote about an issue I had with the display of this website in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser versions 6 and below.

I had already spent several hours trying to fix the problem, and not being successful, I reckoned my time would be better spent writing useful articles than chasing Internet Explorer’s wanky bugs.

But I promised to find time to fix the issue later.

While it was easy enough for me to rationalize that writing useful content was more important than fixing browser bugs, being the perfectionist that I am, I couldn’t really put the problem down.

So the least time that I had, I’d fire up my text editor (I use Textmate) and start coding… albeit in my mind. And this morning, I was finally able to fix the problem.

So what was amiss? The problem was the search form at the upper-right corner of the page. Apparently Internet Explorer, by default, adds some extra vertical space below forms!

And the fix was really simple, as is often the case after one understands the problem at hand. For those of you who speak Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS), all I had to do was add an inline style to the form tag as follows:

<form action="" id="" style="margin:0;padding:0">

Simple huh? Sure. But there’s still a tiny little … 1px … problem. If you’re reading this page in Internet Explorer 6 or earlier versions, you’ll see a tiny white line below the highlighted top menu item “The Journal”. This shouldn’t be the case … or at least, it’s not the intended behaviour.

In all versions of Firefox (and all other browsers tested here), there’s no white line between the darker blue and lighter blue backgrounds (ok, now you know I don’t know color names ).

I’m still looking to fix this, so if you’ve got any suggestions, don’t hesitate to drop them in. And if this website displays in a wanky way on your computer, please send me a screenshot along with some information about your computer setup (especially operating system and browser versions).