newbie question about CSS in different browsers

[theapeman]

Not sure if this is a dumb question with a really obvious answer or a really great question that no one ever asked before. (knowing me, I'd guess the former, but you never know...)

So I have a wordpress site on a shared host and it looks nice in Firefox. In IE6 and IE7 it looks not so nice. Fonts seem too big and so forth. From what I've read, this must be pretty common. I expect I could fix it with a conditional comment and a separate IE stylesheet.

But how do I know what changes have to be made? If I wanted to fix a site for Firefox, I'd just check out the CSS in WebDeveloper, tweak the CSS until the page looked right and then save the CSS. But I would need a WebDeveloper plugin for IE6 to do this, right? How do I change the CSS and see how the change effects the page when viewed in IE without (1) monkeying around with the site and making bad changes that visitors see, (2) without having to toggle between FF and IE, and (3) without changing the way the site looks in FF?

The whole thing is also complicated by the fact that I'm on a Linux box -- I can run Windows in VirtualBox and I do have access to a Windows computer if necessary. In fact, in my virtual Windows I tried using a combination of the WebDeveloper and IE Tab extensions in Firefox, thinking I could view the page in the IE Tab and then modify the CSS in WebDeveloper and make changes to the page in real time as seen in IE, but what happens is instead of seeing the page's CSS, you actually see the CSS for the IE Tab... or something. Anyhow, it didn't work.

What am I missing? I appreciate any suggestions.

[encyclo]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld theapeman. Usually IE6/7 handle font size in a similar way to Firefox when in standards-compliance mode. So what doctype are you using, and how exactly are you defining your font sizes?

I run Windows XP via VMWare under Kubuntu, it's the easiest way to check IE in Linux. :)

[theapeman]

Thanks for your reply. A quick forum-related query first: Is it possible to see the entire thread when I'm responding to a reply? Right now I can only see my original post, which makes it hard to reply to the reply, if you get my meaning. Maybe if I had a photographic memory like Reagan!

Secondly, I have since discovered the IE developer toolbar, which is letting me do my thing now.

I know your reply mentioned doc type and a maybe something else, but since I can't read your reply while writing this post, I'm kind of at a loss....!

But the IE developer toolbar was really the missing piece for me. I needed a tool for IE that was the equivalent of WebDeveloper in Firefox.

As to VMWare, I'm on Ubuntu Dapper, and I could never get VMWare to work, but I got VirtualBox running the first day. Maybe the second. : )

Thanks again! I'm sure I'll be using these forums a lot.