search

MITLibraries / oastats-ui

The User Interface for the MIT Libraries Open Access Statistics Project
0 stars 2 forks source link

IE10 display issues #77

Closed matt-bernhardt closed 10 years ago

matt-bernhardt commented 10 years ago

This is probably related to IE10 being in "compatibility" mode. Darcy has more information.

matt-bernhardt commented 10 years ago

Here are some IE screenshots with the browser in various configurations. While the native display of IE11 looks to be pretty much spot-on, compatibility mode is more problematic. Emulating earlier versions reveals problems as well.

This may be a case where to-the-pixel correspondence isn't possible, but the interface should still be usable without feeling crippled.

IE 11 (Native Mode) ie 11 native IE 11 (Compatibility Mode) ie 11 compatibility IE 10 Emulation ie 10 IE 7 Emulation ie 7

matt-bernhardt commented 10 years ago

This particular issue is probably going to need IE conditional stylesheets. Compatibility Mode is a general approximation of IE7.

gravesm commented 10 years ago

I'm jumping in without having heard any of the previous discussion, so feel free to disregard. Is the problem that IE10 is all messed up in compatibility mode, or that the site doesn't work on IE7? If the former, I would suggest the solution is to force it to display in standards mode. There's no reason we should be specifically supporting compatibility mode in newer browsers. The doctype as is should be enough to trigger standards mode unless the user has specifically forced compatibility mode by pressing a button. In that case <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"> would override their choice and force standards mode.

If we really are trying to support IE7... Do we have numbers for how many users are actually on 7? I can't imagine this is more than about 0.5%.

matt-bernhardt commented 10 years ago

The best indications I have are that both compatibility mode, and IE 7, are problematic. I agree that the doctype and valid markup should be enough to trigger IE into standards mode, and the tests I've done indicate that this is happening. The meta tag you mention will be part of the next release (or the equivalent .htaccess line or some such) - which hopefully should resolve that part the problem. If it doesn't (I'm suspicious that there's some way for the user to force their browser to ignore the meta tag), then the resulting rendering is close enough to what IE7 (via emulation) claims to see, that the fallback of a conditional stylesheet should (fingers crossed) resolve the problem that way.

As for the market share of IE7, I had to look at this the other day - it is surprisingly high. Market share for IE7 among traffic to libraries.mit.edu in March - specifically from the MIT network - was around 1.25%. The latest figures I saw from the general internet population was even higher, but I don't have the links handy.

Given this, I'm somewhat loathe to drop IE7. Not that I want to spend the effort to give them to-the-pixel accuracy, but something better than that last screenshot would be desirable.