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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T14:19:46+00:00

Building a site super quick and having it work on all my Mac browsers,

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Building a site super quick and having it work on all my Mac browsers, I thought I’d take a gander on a friends old dell laptop with Windows XP and IE6.

Nothing looks remotely correct. It’s because I used lots of left/right/top/bottom (constraint) declarations to size elements proportionally to their parent’s size (I didn’t use percent sizes because the percents refer to the parent’s size before margins and padding are applied, left/right/top/bottom refer to them after with position:absolute. I’m asking about that here :)).

I’ve read lots these past few weeks on how horrible IE6 (and IE) is in general, but because of all the reasons people say to support it (large market share and the fear of installing better software), and because half the people in the company we’re building a site for use IE6 (getting them to upgrade to Chrome slowly but surely), I thought if I could just get IE6 to render my constraints, that might help.

So I am messing around with simple layouts here, and they work fine in my latest versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera, but IE6 is basically saying:

If you haven’t set a width or height on me, I’m assuming it’s zero.

But position:absolute; left:0px; right:0px; top:0px; bottom:0px; on a container that’s width:1000px; height:1000px; should be the same as setting width:1000px; height:1000px on the child, no?

Taking a quick look at the source for this, why won’t IE6 render the constraint based absolutely positioned AND SIZED elements? (note: I will be messing around with that file for a while)

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In short, yes, it really doesn’t allow this (“absolute edge-positioning”); it’s a well-known and long-standing bug. Missing width on absolute-positioned elements always triggers shrink-to-fit behaviour even if width should be deducible from left/right. Same vertically.

    why won’t IE6 render the constraint based absolutely positioned AND SIZED elements?

    I don’t see that in the example at the moment. In general if you declare both edges and a dimension (eg. left+right+width), an absolutely-positioned elements is ‘over-constrained’ and one of the rules is discarded to make the others fit.

    /* tables still need ‘cellspacing=”0″‘ in the markup */

    Nope. A combination of border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; plus padding: 0 on the cells renders cellspacing/cellpadding unnecessary (thank goodness).

    clear:both; /* ie6 requires for absolutely positioned elements! */

    ???

    no.

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