Last updated: 24/03/2008 16:27:18 GMT
double spaced IE list items
Recently I was using an unordered list to create vertical navigation. Fairly standard stuff. Building and testing in Firefox and everything seemed dandy. Tested in IE and I had suddenly acquired doubled spacing. See the screen shots below for an illustration.
Internet Explorer
Here is the 'offending' code, note it is 100% valid html and css (excuse the # in the hrefs):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
a{display:block; padding:2px; background-color:#CCCCCC; border-bottom:1px solid #999999; font-family:arial; font-size:0.8em }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div style="width:25%">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">list item 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 3</a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Can you spot anything wrong?
If you can I would really appreciate an email detailing what it is.
The fix (or hack which ever term you prefer):
Well you have two options, either remove all the white space inbetween the <li></li> tags or, and rather bizarrely, add a trailing space to the text inside the link.
So you can either have:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
a{display:block; padding:2px; background-color:#CCCCCC; border-bottom:1px solid #999999; font-family:arial; font-size:0.8em }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div style="width:25%">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">list item 1</a></li><li><a href="#">list item 2</a></li><li><a href="#">list item 3</a></li><li><a href="#">list item 4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Or you can have:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
a{display:block; padding:2px; background-color:#CCCCCC; border-bottom:1px solid #999999; font-family:arial; font-size:0.8em }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div style="width:25%">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">list item 1 </a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 2 </a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 3 </a></li>
<li><a href="#">list item 4 </a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Notice the space after the 1,2,3,4.
Here is the fixed list:
