Head Scratcher- h1 ghosting

[Gilead]

A client sent a screen capture of a site I designed and maintain. The text appears fine(a heading 1 title and paragraph of text), but there is a repeat of the h1 tag along the right side of the screen. I've never seen anything like this before in all my years of web design. They are using IE, but the css should let everything work no matter what the browser. Has anyone seen this kind of thing before? Is there any way to fix it?

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[edited by: incrediBILL at 12:48 am (utc) on Aug 21, 2013]
[edit reason] URls removed. Please see forum charter and TOS [/edit]

[Hoople]

It looks like you have changed the design since that capture was made. I see no <h1> tag in the source.

There is a <h2> tag with <center>Apparent page title</center> inside it. Odd syntax. I'm not up to speed on HTML5 but I've never seen that! validator.w3.org reports 27 errors and 13 warning, some of which I have never seen.

I would clear up the whole lot as older browsers may choke or even crash on it.

[rainborick]

I tested the site in IE10 and was only able to reproduce the effect when the browser was set to IE7 emulation. On the whole, it looks like a quirk of that browser. I'd encourage the client to upgrade to at least IE8.

[Gilead]

Thanks guys!

[drhowarddrfine]

Send them a screenshot of the web page working and it's fixed.

Screenshots and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee so they're beyond worthless. The client is getting reflections on the screen or a bad monitor. One or the other.

Now charge him an hourly charge to investigate it plus media fees.

[Hoople]

The validator.w3.org still reports 27 errors and 13 warnings.

All indicative a serious page structure defect. Re-reading them it sounds like you pasted a whole page into the head of an empty template page.

Somehow both pages have no character encoding declared. That validator is your friend, it will find odd display issues when your swear your code is perfect!

I've used the W3 validator for 10+ years and swear by it most times and swear at it when it spits out incomprehensible error messages. Invariably a web search of the error leads back here to a WW forum with a verbose answer and cure.

[swa66]

I tested the site in IE10 and was only able to reproduce the effect when the browser was set to IE7 emulation.

Well then tell IE10 NOT to emulate obsolete versions.

<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=edge" />

should do it (the last slash is only needed in xhtml.

[rainborick]

I meant to imply that *only* old versions of IE seemed to exhibit the problem, not that IE10 had any issues.

[swa66]

IMHO one needs to test every different version of IE that is agreed upon as being supported. Using a real browser installed as the default browser.

To that purpose I keep a collection of virtual machines around (and only for that purpose).
Every time MSFT makes yet another IE version I clone a virtual machine (if the #$%^ thing want to run on an older OS) and try to see if and when I can zap the oldest one.

But assuming that the different IE versions behave themselves isn;t in the books for MANY years to come.