IE span not same width as Firefox

[Hagelbrakare]

Hi!

I have a problem with IE not using all space for span. Firefox uses as much space as possible, which is exactly what I wanted, but IE breaks at hyphens and word breaks at what looks like random positions.

The span is in a div. The span has a class="link_description" and the div has an id="d_links".

.link_description {
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: 8pt;
color: #cc6600;
clear: both;
float: left;
margin-bottom: 20px;
}

#d_links {
width: 400px;
height: 400px;
margin-top: 45px;
margin-left: 225px;
position: absolute;
}

You can view an example at http://laeder.se/beta . The site is in swedish though and the tab in question is "länkar" which meens links. If you click on "rollspel" or "musik" and so on you will get links on the right side. I fetch those from an xml file so it's hard to see the generated html from the xslt file.

I know that a width: 100% would fix it, but that feels like a hack.

Thanks in advance!

[AricC]

Have you tried this CSS white-space: nowrap?

[Hagelbrakare]

Yes I did, but that made the text not wrap at all. I want the text to wrap at the end of the div. With nowrap it will just pass the div and continue until the end of the line. This happend it both IE and Firefox.

I thougt the idea of a span, as I understood it, was to be the lenght of it's content unless it runs out of space. IE obviously has another idea and I don't know how it interprets the code.

[Hagelbrakare]

Oh well, I ended up using white-space: nowrap for the link_text and link_url and width: 100% for link_description. Now it finally looks the same in both browsers, but being a programmer I'm really frustraded to having to make a work-around for something that I really don't understand.

Is IE broken? Is Firefox broken? Or are they just not agreeing on how to interpret the span-tag?

Anyway, thanks for the input!

[drhowarddrfine]

IE6 and IE7 are old, buggy and non-standard browsers; the worst on the planet. Firefox and others are more up to date with web standards. So you must make your initial code tests in Firefox or Opera, then adjust IEs quirks and bugs. You don't make the modern browsers look like IE but try and make IE work like modern browsers.

Hm. She doesn't look Swedish.

[Hagelbrakare]

I use Ultraedit for development and Firefox to view the result. Most things looks and work ok in IE, but sometimes I encounter differences that I have to work around. And I suspected that it was IE that was broken.

And you're absolutely right. She's not swedish. She's thai.