Weird rendering problem

[tedster]

Has anyone ever seen a display with dashed lines superimposed? Here's a screenshot [themews.com] of what one of my client sees -- and only on their site, not other domains, so I can't write it off to their equipment.

I haven't got a clue where all those dashed blue lines are coming from. Anyone?

[mivox]

Good heavens! That's one of the strangest things I've ever seen! I noticed some dashed lines at the bottom of my MyYahoo news page, but I chalked it up to the 'themes' you can assign to your page... the Yahoo dashes are centered, four rows of pale grey dashes on a darker grey background.

[tedster]

The variation in each appearance of the dashes is one of the strangest elements in this puzzle. Also, the color of the dashes is the same as the hex color that the css file assigns to bold tags. Hm... maybe I'll try a few changes on a test page and see what happens.

Still would appreciate any comments if this looks at all familiar to anyone.

[sugarkane]

The only thing that springs to mind is a background image uploaded using ASCII not binary?

[minnapple]

I have seen something similar to this in a html document.
It was when the </td></tr> was not included before a new <tr><td>

[bill]

not sure exactly where it comes from, but I recall seeing this on my older machines (166 Pentium) when browsing pages that use CSS and have form elements. This marking will dissappear if you scroll past it and then return to the same spot. I'd always assumed that this was due to a lack of memory on my older machines, or the slower processor.

[tedster]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. We still haven't resolved this issue. The client's machine is a two month old Sony notebook 750MHz with 128 RAM, running Windows ME and MSIE 5.5. (At purchase, I suggested they go for Win2000 Professional instead of ME. I find ME to be rather quirky, and it may even be part of the problem here.)

The code is pretty vanilla: HTML (it validates as transitional 4.0) and CSS1, no javascript. So I still suspect the equipment: graphics card and/or LCD display. However, I was on the phone with the client for a while, and the lines do not disappear when scrolled off the screen and then back. CSS still may be part of the equation -- especially the absolute positioning.

Sheesh, it's always something!

I'm not going to pour a lot more time into this as long as no one else reports seeing the dashes. In fact, I'm also getting a new Sony notebook next week -- then maybe I'll learn something.

[Xoc]

They are using an ATI video card. The drivers have bugs. ATI hasn't been able to write a decent video driver in their entire corporate history. I dream of being made head of software engineering at ATI. I'd walk in the first day, call a department meeting, and fire the lot of them!

[tedster]

Xoc, your information is very timely -- I just had a second report of the problem. Now I can dive in a bit deeper.

Off hand, do you what causes the ATI card to wig out? Is it something I can easily avoid?

[Xoc]

No. The driver is trashing video memory. It's a bug. The workaround is to pull the ATI video card and install some other brand.

What sucks about ATI is that their hardware is okay. Their software is bad. They've got this engineering firm mentality that say that we do hardware so that's where we spending our time and money.