IE7 changes order of css selectors - css

I have some css code that only hides a certain element if another element's value is 0
#type_46[value="0"] ~ .exercise_dur {
display: none;
}
This works in every browser except ie7 (ie9 in ie7 mode/ie7 document mode)
When troubleshooting using ie dev tools, If I look directly at the styles list, I see:
[value='0']#type_46 ~ .exercise_dur
Which obviously breaks the selector and causes it not to work. If I manually (in the dev tools) correct this, it works perfectly without any issues.
Has anyone experienced this problem? If so, is there a workaround other than hiding the element in the javascript?
EDIT: (can't answer my own question yet so I have to edit)
It appears that the problem is that ie7 is not dynamically updating the css. When the code is initialized, it doesn't work because the value is not set before the css loads. It updates if I force it to (i.e. change the code or disable/re-enable the style) but then doesn't update (even if I change the value) until it is forced again. ie7 is not a huge priority for this project and hiding the element is not absolutely necessary, so I think I'm going to leave this one for now and implement it in jquery if necessary later.
Thanks.

Support for the general sibling selector in IE7 is buggy at best. I recommend figuring out another way to select your elements, or use jQuery.
Read more.

Related

How to debug CSS codes?

How does one generally debug CSS and resolve issues when some elements on the page are not appearing as they should? For now, I have to painfully comment out CSS declarations one by one to understand how the styles are getting displayed.
While you can not "debug" CSS, because it is not a scripting language, you can utilize the Chrome DevTools Elements panel to inspect an element & view the Styles pane on the right.
This will give you insights as to the styles being overridden or ignored (line threw).
CTRL + SHIFT + I
To Find Errors & Warnings use CSSLint
Debugging CSS and HTML code bugs can really ruin your application design. There are multiple ways to debug CSS and HTML code. There are few things or ways you should consider the debugging and taking care while developing HTML or writing CSS.
Check your syntax errors with http://csslint.net/. It provides the
nice tool and highlights a line where an error occurs.
Closely review your cross-browser compatibility issues. A site looks nice and beautiful in a firefox but sometimes it will not
look nice with another browser at that time you should take care of
cross-browser compatibility issues of CSS. You should nice and proper
CSS framework that will prevent to generate cross-browser issues and
verify HTML tags and CSS properties which may support by browser
correctly.
Browser web developer tool allows outlining an HTML and element with
different criteria this will allow to writing appropriate CSS for HTML
element.
Turn on or off stylesheet with Chrome dev tools. If you’re wondering
how your CSS is affecting a particular page element, the Chrome
DevTools make it easy to toggle each property. In the Google Chrome
web browser, simply right click and choose Inspect Element from the
context menu.On the right side of the Elements panel, you should see a
tab called Styles with some CSS inside of it. This shows you which CSS
declarations are being applied to the selected element, and if you
hover over each CSS property, you can uncheck them individually. When
a property is crossed out, it typically means that it is being
overridden elsewhere. You may need to uncheck a property in several
places to actually remove it from an element.
Use computed tab in chrome dev tools. it tells you exactly how the
browser is computing your styles. When working on large projects this
is essential for resolving cascading issues, problems with selector
specificity, and more.
You may enable chrome dev tools with ctrl+shirt+I or press F12 key
which supports in almost every browser.
Use this to debug your css
* { outline: solid 0.25rem hsla(210, 100%, 100%, 0.5); }

Firefox making CSS Rules up?

This is what I see on the inspector:
There's like a left highlight in two rules, which are the ones Firefox is making up,
if I look on the computed styles I see this:
And finally this is how the original CSS looks like:
So Firefox it's changing the position and width rules somehow.
Anyone can explain me why is this happening and how to avoid Firefox changing those rules?
(In Chrome, Safari works fine)
The "left highlight" is used to indicate a style rule that has been modified within the Developer Toolbar since the page loaded. Reloading the page and/or restarting the browser should repair the rules from your stylesheet.
If you're still encountering the issue after this "quick fix", my next advice is to search your stylesheet(s) for position: absolute, disable them one at a time, and re-test. It's very unlikely Firefox is changing your style rules on its own.
You might also find it easier to postpone minifying your CSS while you're debugging. That way you'll get more useful line numbers to reference vs. having every rule cited as being on master.css:1.
Finally, you might find it advantageous to use shallow selectors in your CSS rather than deeply nested selectors like the one you've shown. This will help avoid specificity conflicts, which was likely the original cause of the issue you're encountering.

How to reset all styles of a div and decedents back to Chrome defaults

I'm not sure this is possible, but id like to set all user styles back to chrome defaults for div and descendants.
I'm building a Chrome plugin that creates a popup on any web page, however due to the fact every page has a plethora of custom styles, trying to track down every inconsistency and overwrite it with my divs (and descendants) custom style, it is becoming a nightmare.
Every time I think I've covered all bases another site implements something else that needs to be overridden.
What would be the easiest approach to standardize my popup in this situation?
One approach I can think of is to (bite the bullet) and get a hold of the the default Chrome CSS styles and implement them into a series of catch all descendant selectors, however surely there is a better way.
If you want to be absolutely sure that the styling of your elements is not affected by the web-page's CSS, there are 2 possible solutions:
Use an iframe to implement your popup. (This solution is "safe" and simple enough, but based on the kind of interaction between the popup and the web-page it might become cumbersome.)
Utilize the Shadow DOM. (This is probably the "proper" solution, but the implementation might be a little more complicated.)
Some resources regarding the 2nd solution:
An introductory tutorial.
An actual example of incorporating the "Shadow DOM" concept into a Chrome extension:
RobW's Display Anchors extension
There is a third option worth discussing and rejecting, which is to reset all the style properties of the div and its descendents to its default value. Pseudo-code:
#my-div, #my-div * {
#for-every-css-property {
%propertyName: initial !important;
}
}
This answer shows an attempt at such a solution. It uses specific values instead of initial which will work in older browsers without the initial keyword, but will not correctly reset elements which have a different default from the base (e.g. user566245 mentions that textarea elements should have a border).
Issues:
Unfortunately initial is not actually the browser's default value.
If we don't use !important above then there is a risk that the page might have provided a rule with a more specific elector which overrides our own. For example if the page specified properties for table > tr > td then this would be applied over our rule because that selector is more specific than #my-div *.
Since we do use !important, any custom styling we want to do after the reset must also use !important on every property.
If the page happens to inject any additional CSS styles after ours that uses !important then these can override our reset.
It is rather inefficient. We are asking the browser to apply a huge bunch of CSS rules to every element under our div.
Vendor-specific properties should also be reset. (E.g. -webkit-animation-name.)
If new CSS properties come into existence in future, you will need to update your list.
Whilst this solution can be applied to current browsers, it is rather horrible, so roll on Shadow DOM! I would recommend the <iframe> solution in the meantime.
I don't know if anyone has tried this, but a more efficient solution might be to use Javascript to detect what site-defined CSS properties could be problematic, and reset only those.

Why won't IE7 recognize class calls to an external stylesheet, but will recognize inline styling?

When using IE8 to view IE7 through the developer tool's browser mode feature, I am having an odd recurring problem with CSS. When I make changes to an external stylesheet and then reference that class in the HTML, it's like IE7 won't recognize it at all. If, however, I put that same styling inline, IE7 will obey it. Has anyone heard of this before? Here's a simple example to help illustrate what I'm saying:
External stylesheet:
.bold {
font-weight:bold;
}
Call in HTML:
<p class="bold">My paragraph here</p>
No changes will be effective in IE7, although all other browsers are fine.
If however, I do this:
<p style="font-weight:bold;">My paragraph here</p>
IE7 seems happy. What's the difference? Do I really have to make CSS changes this way, or is there another workaround?
I'm baffled as to what the issue could be. I don't know if the developer tool's browser mode has a quirk and doesn't quite work as a real-life version of IE7 would, or if this is something completely different. I am using IE8 (I can't upgrade to IE9 at this government computer), but I've heard the problem persists with my changes in IE9's browser mode of IE7 too.
We're using ColdFusion to generate the HTML, using an HTML5 doctype (), and I've added a timestamp parameter to the 2 external stylesheet references so the browser is forced to grab a new copy every time.
Any help with this mystery would be hugely appreciated - thank you!
======
For #Stano or anyone else who is interested in recreating the exact problem, here is a stripped down version of it: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B02DZPpIlMwGSk1VZHRDUHNCTkU (Can click File > Download to get the zip). Notice in IE7, "Photographer" is fine because it has inline styling, but the others aren't picking up anything.
With regards to your comments, you're right in saying that it could be a caching issue, but it could also be an issue with that stylesheet (though it doesn't look like that's the case), another stylesheet, or invalid HTML.
One of the things that I want to correct you on, because I think it may influence your understanding of how CSS and HTML interact, is that class attributes in HTML elements do not call CSS. Rather, CSS rules tell the browser agent how to render things with certain attributes. This is why we are able to use the elements ID, name, groupname, class, and other values to identify which elements to apply which class to.
I mention this because if you have invalid HTML (a missing end tag, a missing arrow, etc.) it can do all sorts of weird things. A few days ago it helped me solve an issue where a misplaced tag was actually causing a script of mine to loop on one of my pages.
Take a quick second and validate your HTML using the W3C Markup Validator.

CSS Compatibility IE7 - IE8 problem

Problem:
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'm having a problem which I need to solve as simple as possible. There's a website I'm re-developing, but since I updated to IE8, I've totaly forgotten about IE7, but ofcourse, there are still people using it.
I need to know what specific things I should change for this site to display the same way as it does in IE8. But I don't know where to start. Is there anyone with experience in this, who can give me a guideline? Are there scripts for doing so?
URL: http://www.testsite.c-tz.nl/
If you view this with IE8 it looks perfect.
But if you view it with IE7, things are not where they supposed to be, very ugly.
As the other said, your question is to broad. You'll need to break it down in smaller problems - which will possibly help you solve it yourself along the way.
One thing I did notice: IE has problems with display: inline-block on elements, which were orignally block elements. Either use span (only possible if it doesn't contain block elements), or use another method to places blocks side by side such as float.
BTW, you have far too many divs in your HTML. It's not necessary to wrap every img, every ul, etc. in it's own div. Usually any styles you apply to the div can just as well be applied you the "wrapped" element directly.
This is not a cool idea... But you can try when you are sick with very old browsers like ie6 or ie5 ...
1.use javascript to detect the browser and version..
2.later use the similar way to redirect the visitor to download the IE 8..
<script>
if(''+browserName+''+fullVersion+'' == "Microsoft Internet Explorer6.0" )
{
alert("You're using an Old Browser.Update the browser to view the website.(or) Try Latest Google Chrome , Firefox , Safari, Opera")
window.location = "http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=43"
}
//document.write(''+browserName+''+fullVersion+'');
</script>

Resources