DavidW
19th of November 2006 (Sun), 20:27
We've got a thread on this already - see here (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=223695). You are right, though - I can't get the search features to work on the EE forums either, and it would be helpful if Pekka could look at that.
In summary, there's something broken in IE6's CSS handling. None of us can figure out exactly what, otherwise we may be able to make EE 2 tolerant of this IE6 bug. As it is, I think we're stuck - if there's any browser gurus around here, your input would be welcome.
EE 2.01 is outputting valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (which validates on all the validators I've tried), which is probably the toughest standard there is for HTML right now. Other browsers, including Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2 and IE7 cope correctly with the EE output. The only problem on IE6 is the per-gallery thumbs; everything else works correctly.
IE6 is broken in various ways and clearly Microsoft aren't going to bother to fix anything other than security issues (even then, their record isn't great; there are a lot of known security issues outstanding in IE6 - check out Secunia). Microsoft have made their policy clear - they're regarding IE7 as a critical update to Windows XP (and, I believe, Windows 2003 Server as well), which means that most users will move over sooner or later. There will be some people who don't upgrade, such as those on Windows 2000, but there's always Firefox 2 for those boxes.
I will upgrade my Windows XP boxes to IE7 eventually - for now, I'm holding back whilst the rest of the world catches up with the changes. I'd dabbled with Firefox for a while, and with the release of Firefox 2, it's now my main browser.
I appreciate you feeling no alternative but to downgrade to EE 1.5 because of this problem. I'm annoyed about it too, but it's not something that I think will be fixed. It only robs you of your thumbnails in one context; unfortunately that context is the list of galleries on the index page. The bug is in a browser, and unless anyone comes along and tells us exactly what in the affected <div...> </div> structure IE6 is barfing on and how to change it whilst not breaking XHTML 1.0 Strict rules, I think no fix is going to be forthcoming.
In the end, I think you'll find yourself leaving EE 1.5 behind eventually, not least as Pekka has pretty much deprecated it and it's not as hardened as EE 2 is. You'll have to judge when the number of users visiting your site with the broken IE6 has dropped to the level where you can make the switch; there comes a point where you have to drop optimal support for some older browsers for the sake of progress. Monitoring your server logs may be worthwhile to try to judge what browsers your visitors are using.
I wish it was better news. Pekka would be the most likely person to fix this, but he's understandably indicated that browser specific workrounds are not the way he intends to operate with EE 2, and if a browser fails to deal with EE's XHTML 1.0 Strict which passes validation, that's down to the browser. He's not ruled out code changes so long as they don't stop the output from validating, but it's not where he's intending to spend his time.
I'm stuck as to what to do about this and with IE6 likely to be very much less prevalent on the Internet within a few months, I have no real appetite to investigate it further. I tried some theories based on the complexities of the troublesome <div> and got nowhere (I made a static version of my gallery's home page and tried some manual edits). When I get some more time to work on EE, I intend to spend it on looking at the internal EXIF code (which isn't working properly in some cases - thanks to a forum user I have an image that it barfs on now) and look towards some reworking of the metadata handling adding GPS support as I go.
There are a few other people in the forums who've contributed patches for EE2, but nobody else has shown much interest in this problem.
David