Now that’s interesting. Katie discovered yesterday that when you start typing a comment in Internet Explorer 5, the comment box springs to the full width of the page, hiding the right side below the sidebar.

I just checked IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 – it turns out that this is still present in MSIE 6.0!

My first guess was that this has to do with “width: 99%” being assigned to the text input area. By any reasonable interpretation of CSS, this should mean it’s 99% of the surrounding box, which is true in Mozilla/Netscape, Opera, and Konqueror (and presumably Safari). It’s also true in IE 5.5 and 6.0 – until you start typing, at which point IE changes the width for some reason.

It turns out this is present in the default WordPress template as well. Great.

As a workaround, I’ve changed it to set the box’s max-width instead of its width. That way it doesn’t trigger the bug in IE, and it still shrinks if the window (or screen) is too narrow to show the whole box.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Since IE doesn’t recognize max-width in the first place, it won’t shrink if you’re using IE and the window is too small. Just to see what would happen, I set it to 800×600. Guess what? It’s too small. I changed the number of columns so that it’ll fit with the default font size on Windows, but who knows about people who use larger fonts?

Gotta love that Internet Explorer. I’ve worked around the bug, but I’ve just gotta say…

Firefox: Take Back the Web

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