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** If you use a <!Doctype that puts IE6 into standards-compliant mode (HTML or XHTML), then you can only highlight blocks of text.
** If you use a <!Doctype that puts IE6 in non-standards mode, then highlighting of text is normal.
This 'feature' of Zen-Cart prevents you from embedding links in your text, that will work.
I really need to fix this. The development team passed it off as an IE bug. I don't accept that. Other standards-compliant sites don't have this problem.
To see this in action... Google search "powered by zen-cart". All the sites have this problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
On my machine I get the bug even with IE in quirks mode, with a partial DTD.
1. The bug seemed to be related to the class td.main (a whole td gets selected at once) So I removed that class from the css file. No change. Then I removed the attribute from the HTML - with no change.
2. I read somewhere that comment tags can create a highlighting bug in IE. I removed all the comment tags. Still no change.
3. I noticed some attributes like this <img height="50px" /> so I removed the px units, but still no change.
4. I removed the xmlns attribute from the <html> tag - and still no change.
5. In the meta tag, I switched from this:
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
to this:
content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=iso-8859-1"
And you guessed it, the bug was still there.
All I've done so far is rule some things out. but that's the start of a debug process at any rate.
Hello Juxi, and welcome to the forums.
Zen-Cart is a branch of osCommerce. One of its goals is XHTML / CSS compliance. However, there is still a lot of legacy code. I think the problem is related to the use of new and old code and may disappear as the code is converted. But, that’s in the future.
Right now the problem prevents using clickable links on the site. I consider that a major flaw that may turn off potential website owners and may influence website developers and hosting services to not support it, saying that it is not yet ready-for-primetime.
I tried some of the things you tried, plus
Using IE6 on Win2000, the bug showed up in all compliant modes, but NOT in quirk modes. Even the tag soup created by leaving in extra end tags, when DOCTYPE is set to HTML 4 quirk mode, did not prevent IE 6 from handling the text properly. Other things were broken, like page centering, but word highlighting did work.
Discussion in the Zen-Cart forum disclosed that the problem is also present with IE6/WinXP, but NOT with IE6/Win98. Netscape and Mozilla don’t seem to have the problem.
Areas that I think may be fertile to investigate are
I’m not a programmer and after 30 hours (much it, just to learn what I’m looking ), this has been frustrating.
Tedster, your help and anyone else’s is very much appreciated. Especially those site developers who might be thinking about supporting Zen-Cart, this would be a good exercise to get into and learn some of the code. ;)
the problem is also present with IE6/WinXP, but NOT with IE6/Win98
Well, I was on Win98 for my tests - and not only do I see the problem, I see it both in standards mode AND in quirks mode.
I design pages that conform to the latest XHTML standards using CSS. However, IE 6 has introduced a well-known and well-documented bug (at least within the XHTML and CSS community). The bug is that you cannot select text when using absolutely-positioned DIVs. It ONLY happens in IE6, not previous versions and not in Netscape/Mozilla.Much has been written on the subject, but I haven't heard of any official response from anyone at Microsoft. I know Microsoft employees participate in these groups, so if any of you could shed some light on the status of this, it would certainly be appreciated by the design community.
Example commentary on the subject:
[blog.tom.me.uk...]
Blog has a hack that apparently works.
Sorry about that Win98 thing, that's what I was told.
Since you've resolved the problem, I think I'll haul out my soapbox for a minute.
<soapbox>
I think there's something really "off" with a lot of the XHTML development that I see happening. Especially TRANSITIONAL xhtml. I mean, what's the point? Do these sites really need xml? In many cases, the answer is no. Rather it's a trendy, "follow the latest thing" kind of attitude on the part of the developers, and it's not ground in reality but in geekdom.
First, if you really want to be cutting edge, then write STRICT mark-up, not transitional. And in view of the various browser support issues with xhtml, html 4.01 strict seems to me to be a more practical direction - unless xml is essential for the website's data modeling.
Darn lonely up here, with you.
<climbs off soapbox and goes to Amazon.com to find books on CSS, HTML, XHTML, XML for newbees>
I need to correct a previous statement.
Right now the problem prevents using clickable links on the site. I consider that a major flaw that may turn off potential website owners and may influence website developers and hosting services to not support it, saying that it is not yet ready-for-primetime.
Call-off-the-dogs. Selecting text is still a problem/feature, but that statement about links is NOT TRUE.
When I made it, I assumed that if I could not click on an individual word… then clicking embedded links could not possibly work. That was a FALSE ASSUMPTION.
Its true that IF you use an absolute positioned <DIV>, THEN visitors can not select individual text, HOWEVER you can insert clickable links within that very same text and they DO WORK normally. I guess that qualifies as a nested-quirk.
If you have access to a demo Zen-Cart site, click on “Gift Certificate FAQ” in the Information sidebox. The links on the FAQ page should work fine, but trying to select the text (above or below the links) will act just as I described. I tested it with IE6 on Win2000, your results may vary.
