Using position: fixed; with IE7

[Eric Lindsay]

Googling suggests that IE7 may support position: fixed;

I think this might be handy for some pages I want to do. Does anyone
have any comments about whether fixed should be considered for use on
new web pages?

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

[Spartanicus]

Eric Lindsay <NO*************@ericlindsay.comwrote:

>Googling suggests that IE7 may support position: fixed;

I think this might be handy for some pages I want to do. Does anyone
have any comments about whether fixed should be considered for use on
new web pages?

Using it has always been fine if you provide as fallback for when its
not supported. I don't have any figures on the uptake of IE7, but
considering that it is only available to XPSP2 and Windows Server 2003
users there must be a large number of IE users that do not use it based
on that criteria alone.

Having said that, personally I am almost always annoyed by the use of
position:fixed, and I have no option to override it in my user
stylesheet. It rarely does anything useful, mostly it wastes precious
screen real estate, and on my system scrolling becomes slow and jerky.

--
Spartanicus

[Eric Lindsay]

In article <75********************************@4ax.com>,
Spartanicus <in*****@invalid.invalidwrote:

Eric Lindsay <NO*************@ericlindsay.comwrote:

Googling suggests that IE7 may support position: fixed;

I think this might be handy for some pages I want to do. Does anyone
have any comments about whether fixed should be considered for use on
new web pages?

Using it has always been fine if you provide as fallback for when its
not supported. I don't have any figures on the uptake of IE7, but
considering that it is only available to XPSP2 and Windows Server 2003
users there must be a large number of IE users that do not use it based
on that criteria alone.

Confound. I somehow had the idea Microsoft were going to push the
upgrade, but didn't realise it needed at least XPSP2. I was hoping for a
really quick uptake.

Having said that, personally I am almost always annoyed by the use of
position:fixed, and I have no option to override it in my user
stylesheet. It rarely does anything useful, mostly it wastes precious
screen real estate, and on my system scrolling becomes slow and jerky.

Thanks for the comments Spartanicus. I hadn't realised position: fixed
impacted system scrolling, since it seemed fine to me.

The web site I was thinking of using position: fixed for is probably
going to have a lot of wasted screen real estate anyhow. The guy who
wants it pointed me to three sample sites, all of which made me want to
throw up. Must check if any of them are valid once you get past the
content free entry page and the SWF.

I just realised that a while ago I had experimented with position fixed
for the menu when I did a little cleanup of some very old pages of mine
that no-one is likely to check http://www.ericlindsay.com/palmtop/ At
the time, I thought it worked on all my browsers, and I hadn't
remembered it causing problems with IE. At least, none that made IE
difficult to use. Safari and Firefox are fine. Now I see Opera doesn't
like the page spacing (probably some obvious error of mine).

I did have a much nastier test page, with each edge fixed, at
http://www.ericlindsay.com/palmtop/palmnote.htm and a bunch of other
tricks you folks probably pointed out to me. Again, it works with
Safari, Firefox and Opera, but I know that page gives problems with some
version of IE. Given the vintage of my test Windows laptop (at present
being borrowed by someone else) probably IE 5.5, although maybe it is
IE6 (I can't recall the last IE to work on Win98SE). Whatever problem it
caused was enough to stop me continuing with that page. I think maybe
the header got jammed on top of the footer. However if it worked with
IE7, I might decide to drop support for earlier IE, and use it for my
Apple pages (I hardly expect many IE users would look there).

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com