First of all, if a width is not specified for the given element, IE will treat it like overflow: visible; causing the element to continue outside of where you want it, like this:

IE Overflow Bug

In order to fix this you need to create a stylesheet just for IE (That’s explained in the last half of this article if you don’t know how to do that). Once you’ve done that, add the following styles to the IE-only stylesheet, where “.element” is the class of the element you’re working with:

.element { overflow-y: auto; overflow-x: visible; width: 450px; }

IE understands overflow-y and overflow-x, and the width is whatever width you want the element to be and it must be set to prevent this problem. In my case, I wanted the element to be as wide as the containing element, which was 450px.

Once you do this, you’ll notice this problem:

Now the bottom line of text is hidden by the horizontal scrollbar

Ok, IE, you’ve really outdone yourself on stupidity this time. It looks like IE is not taking the scroll bar into account in the height of the element. So, now we need to fix that by adding padding-bottom: 20px; to the IE-only stylesheet, and here’s what we get:

.element { overflow-y: auto; overflow-x: visible; width: 450px; padding-bottom: 20px; }

Final result is much better

Voila! Problem solved. Keep in mind, this isn’t a perfect solution…the problem with this is that IE will add that 20px padding at the bottom of the element even if there isn’t a scroll bar, leaving you with some extra space on the bottom of your element in this case. One day soon, hopefully all browsers will render pages in the same way; until then, solutions like these will have to work.

Internet Explorer List Item Margin Problem

So what is the problem exactly? Here’s a snapshot of the sidebar of a site I’m working on in Firefox:

List item margins render properly in Firefox

Incidentally, this is also how it appears in IE 7. Now, the snapshot of how that same unordered list appears in IE 6:

List item margins render with too much spacing in IE6

Whoa! Where did all that extra margin come from?! Well, it certainly didn’t come from the CSS because every single other browser tested displays fine and all the margins are set to 0px, as well as padding. So what’s the problem here?

IE Problem with List Items and Display: Block

The problem rears its ugly head, in this situation, because I have the display property of those list items set to block in the stylesheet. Internet Explorer, but especially version 6, just freaks out when trying to display lists when the links within those lists are styled display: block. So, how do we fix it? We need to trick internet explorer (because its bugginess also allows us to trick it into behaving the way we want) into thinking that the display property is set to inline, after we’ve done that we can essentially tell it we’ve changed our mind and we want the display property set to block. This will make IE really throw a temper tantrum, but it’s exactly the temper tantrum we want it to throw.

Conditional Comment Styles

To solve this we need to add a conditional comment in our header section, preferably near our other stylesheet declarations. This conditional comment is something only IE will read because Microsoft realized their browser was so buggy there had to be a way to give instructions specifically to IE without that instruction being interpreted by other browsers:

<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yourdomain.com/styles/ie.css"  />
<![endif]->

Now you need to create a new stylesheet for Internet Explorer only and call it ie.css.

Once you’ve done that add these two lines to the stylesheet:

#sidebar li a{display:inline-block !important;}
#sidebar li a {display:block !important;}

The “#sidebar” part is part of my stylesheet because the sidebars on that particular site are wrapped in a <div id=”sidebar”></div>. When dealing with IE it’s always best to be as specific as possible. Also, you’ll notice I’ve added the !important declaration to this. The purpose of that is to ensure that when I change some styles later on IE doesn’t go and try to ignore this rule. Generally, IE will adopt the most specific style, so, if I were to add the following line to my general stylesheet:

#sidebar ul li a{display: block; }

IE may try to ignore the hack above in the ie.css file. Why? Because this second declaration is more specific. The !important declaration prevents that.

So, now that we’ve added those two lines to ie.css, what does IE 6 show us?

Final result - Renders properly in IE6

And there you have it, it took a bit of trickery to get that rendered properly in IE6, but it wasn’t all that difficult now was it?