The meeting room is sign-posted from the main EC Stoner Building entrance (level 7, the side facing the Parkinson Tower).

The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea, biscuits and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to the Victoria pub, behind the Town Hall, for geeky chatter.

Talk: Dave Fisher on Why Internet Explorer Breaks Everything … and How To Fix It

Every web developer or designer knows that cross-browser design can be tricky.

A minority know that it’s IE’s fault, because they’ve seen that standards-based designs work identically, and non-standard designs break similarly, in non-IE browsers.

A much smaller number of people know precisely why IE breaks things, and even fewer know how to fix them in a consistent and reliable way.

This talk will explain the three underlying causes beneath scores (possibly hundreds) of apparently different IE rendering ‘bugs’:

1. The non-standard ‘Box Model’
2. Floats that aren’t really Floats
3. The proprietary hasLayout property

The primary purpose of the talk is to use an understanding of these IE ‘features’ to outline a comparatively simple set of procedures for building robust page layouts that don’t need constant tweeking to accommodate new and alternative browsers.

If time permits, the talk will also cover a small number of unique bugs and version-specific gotchas which are not caused by IE’s big three underlying design flaws … including CSS hacks which can and can’t be relied upon.

Location:

Directions:

• Getting to Leeds and Leeds University.
• Campus Map showing entrances and car parks.
• Location of EC Stoner Building on Campus.