gifs gone

is it ie6, non-valid HTML, the server, or all 3?

[mincklerstraat]

A site I've got regularly shows me images as missing in ie6 when they're right where they need to be in the webtree. I never noticed this when I was surfing before with some ie5 variant on a site made with the same script, and am a bit puzzled. Sometimes the pages show simply with the gifs not in place and the space blank, sometimes with the nasty red x box. Often a refresh would correct this, sometimes not.

The site doesn't validate, and I guessed that maybe a problem was the lack of width="x" height="y". I corrected this by adding the parameters for the main problem gif which was making things look seriously ugly, and now this gif shows up most of the time, and never displays the box with the x when it doesn't show up. However, there are also topic icons in various sizes, and I could program the script to define height and width, but would really prefer not to if there was some way to go around this.

Site is hosted on Apache, Free BSD, PHP 4.3. Haven't had the missing gif problem in Mozilla or Konqueror on Linux, only ie6 on Windows. I'd like to try it on ie5.x but I read that XP doesn't allow you to install old versions of ie if you already got an ie. How do you all check your sites for old browser issues?

forgot to mention: other sites also show on my 'puter (with ie6) without gifs, like the thread listing on this site (noticed it also uses gifs w/o specifying height and width).

[edited by: mincklerstraat at 4:58 pm (utc) on May 19, 2003]

[pageoneresults]

This is a known bug in IE. It is something I think most of us have come to accept. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. And, it is usally, if not all the time, smaller gifs that do this.

[mincklerstraat]

thx p1, that was a real quick reply. Yeah, it's mostly the teenier gifs, the bigger offenders were acutally bigger gifs of about 150 x 20, good these only disappear instead of showing those nasty boxes. At any rate, designating width and height did help.

[pageoneresults]

At any rate, designating width and height did help.

Yup, assigining width and height attributes to all images is a good practice. That way your layout isn't jumping all over the place as the images are loading. When you assign width and height, a placeholder is designated on the page using those dimensions.

[cocopuff]

I'm having the same problem except even more so - it's not just gifs, many of my objects (links, jpgs, ...etc) don't show up. Often I only get the box with the red X. Some of time, it doesn't even work to click on a link (does nothing). I'm really beginning to wonder if it's a virus. I've reinstalled IE 6.0 and run the Norton Anti Virus but no luck.
Every once in awhile, it goes back to normal for awhile. E.G. one regular site I visit, has the missing objects problem 80% of the time. But every so often, it displays as normal.
This happened about a week ago. Before that all was fine. I hope this becomes more of a widespread problem so a fix will be addressed soon. It's very maddening.