IE6 bug. Div's height increases when a:hover is triggered - css

Question

I have a page that there is a list of "tags", just like here in SO, and when the mouse is over it, it gets darker.
It works great with Ie7, 8, FF, Chrome, Safari etc... but IE6 has a bug that when a:hover is triggered.
The bug is that the div that those (ul li a) are contained, gets a height's increase.
the css I have is:
div.options ul.tags li a:hover
{
background-color: #D5E4A5;
}
if I delete this style or just comment "background-color: #D5E4A5;" it doesn't happen...
any idea of how to fix it?
thanks!
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the bug:

Answer 1

just fixed it! :D
what I had before was:
<div class="options clearfix">
<!--content here-->
</div>
and I replaced for:
<div class="options">
<div class="clearfix">
<!--content here-->
</div>
</div>
Now IE6 is happy, and I'm happy as well...
Thank you everybody for your help!

Answer 2

This is usually a border getting set that wasn't defined originally. Try setting a border on the growing DIV to the default background color. My guess is that you won't see anyting grow anymore.

Answer 3

I think I ran into this once, and what was happening was that the borders were being modified (or was it the margins?) I ended up copping out, and just giving the problematic elements a transparent border of 1px, and calling it a day.
I really doubt this will turn out to be your solution, but I'm hoping it'll give you some idea in which direction to look in!

Answer 4

I've had that happen to me as well, but I can't remember where that was exactly. I think I did solve it, but I'm not entirely sure how anymore. I can think of two things:
Give the element "layout". I tend to do that with zoom: 1.
Add vertical-align: top to either the a or li element.
Could you give a more complete code example? I can't reproduce it with just that CSS.

Answer 5

Did you specify the height for that div explicitly? If not, setting the height might make this go away.

Answer 6

Are the tags located in a place where you could give them background color all of the time? If so, does setting their background color when :hover is not activated still cause their height to change?
As a note, I can't reproduce this given HTML matching the rule you described, so the problem may be coming from somewhere else higher on the page.
<!-- This does not display the described behavior -->
<div class="options">
<ul class="tags">
<li>c++</li>
<li>not-programming-related</li>
<li>cheese</li>
<li>barnacle</li>
</ul>
</div>
The best thing I can suggest is to do what mercator said and give the element layout.
EDIT: Just a shot in the dark, but you may want to try setting a value for line-height on div.options.
EDIT 2: After seeing your screenshots I recall that I have had this problem at work before, and the fix in my case was to add position:relative; zoom:1; to the container (or maybe the links, I forget!). Try that?
EDIT 3: After googling for some solutions, you may want to try setting the height if your container explicitly. If this doesn't work, I have no idea what to do!

Answer 7

I have this exact problem as well. The trigger is definitely the background color on hover, but the usual solutions of giving the parent hasLayout don't work, I think because of nesting the A tags inside other tags. From what I ended up doing, your solution of nesting the clear fix is the right logic: separating the offending element, parent and clearing objects.
The solution I did was the following:
<div class="options">
<!--content here-->
<!--[if lte IE 6]><div class="ie6clear"></div><![endif]-->
</div>
With the following CSS:
.ie6clear{ clear:both; height:0; overflow:hidden; }
This way the clearfix CSS is only applied for IE6, highlights what the extraneous markup is, and makes it easy to remove when IE6 is no longer supported.