IE Whitespace Bug

Its been a sort of Holy Grail for me (well maybe a Holy Teacup) to find a solution the IE Whitespace bug. If you’re not familiar with this, then you probably haven’t applied display:block to links within an unordered list. Adding this CSS property creates a solid ‘button’ out of what would’ve been a humble inline link, one that can be sized and prettied up as you like. The trouble is, IE windows adds another line height between all these links – unless you remove every bit of whitespace from the HTML.

So, in effect, there is already a fix to this, but it’s not a convenient one. Editing a menu that’s all on one line isn’t my idea of an easy life. Each time I would have to take the file into BBEdit, reformat the code to be ‘Gentle Hierarchal”, make my edits, and then reformat as ‘compact’.

I’d tried various fixes, one that added a negative top margin (overruled for decent browsers by using a first-child selector) worked in 5 & 6, but not 5.5. Then I started dreaming up some php that would strip the whitespace at the server side, but that was too much for my small head.

Now, excuse me if I’m late to the party, and everyone has already discovered the solution to this, but its actually rather simple. Here’s a cut down example:

ul a {
display: block;
float: left;
clear: left;
}

Suddenly, IE 5+ does what it should, and the ones that got it right in the first place just put up with it without a fuss apart from Mozilla. If you find that the menu items are all over the place, add something like this:

li>a {
float: none;
}

The first-child selector means that IE won’t see this rule, but everyone else will.

Tags: bugs, code, css, internetexplorer, webstandards