Question

I have several divs on a webpage that use the IE css filter to create a gradient effect for the background.

The page is viewed primarily in IE6 (I have no other choice unfortunatly) and displays fine on my development machine. I have also tried viewing the page using IETester and the page also displays fine in IE 5.5 to IE 8.

However, when viewing the page on the “live” machine, the gradients don’t show up at all. The browser on the “live” machine is IE 6 with sp3. I have checked the div’s and they all have “hasLayout” so that isn’t the problem.

Are there any settings within IE that would stop filters working or could anybody suggest any other reasons why they would not be showing up. I can’t work out why they work in one version of IE 6 but not another.

Unfortunatly I can’t link to any examples.

Thanks

Answer 1

The filter features of IE are not built into the browser; they are using external libraries (DLLs). This is what the ‘progid’ part is all about, and also explains why some of them are so clunky.

If those DLLs are not installed on the client machine, then the filter styles won’t work. If it works in some IE6 machines but not others, then this is almost certainly the problem you’re encountering.

Theoretically it should be possible for you to fix the problem by installing the missing DLLs.

However, the problem for you is that if the client is anal enough not to have upgraded their browser from IE6 yet, then it’s pretty certain that they’re not going to want to have you fiddling around on their machines installing unknown (to them) libraries. In any case, you would have to do it for every individual machine.

The bottom line is that realistically this is not going to be an option. Your best bet is to give up trying to make IE6 do fancy stuff, and go back to using background images for your gradients. It’s not pleasant to write, but there is a reason why everyone used to do it that way when IE6 was the standard browser.