[Wylug-announce] Next Meeting: Why Internet Explorer Breaks Everything ... and How To Fix It

[Tom Hall]

Hi all,

Firstly, sorry for the late announcement. I would also like to take
the opportunity to ask for speakers in the new year. I know lots of
you are up to cool stuff from talking to you in the pub and would love
for a few more of you to agree to give a talk on something geeky that
interests you at the moment.

Our next meeting will be on Monday 13 October 2008 in Leeds
University's Stoner Building.

The meeting room is sign-posted from the main EC Stoner building
entrance (level 7, the side facing the Parkinson Tower).

The meeting officially starts at 7.00 pm, but the room will be open
for coffee, tea, biscuits and chat from 6.30pm.

Talk:Dave Fisher on:
Why Internet Explorer Breaks Everything ... and How To Fix It
------------------------------------------------------------
Every web developer or designer knows that cross-browser design can be tricky.

A minority know that it's IE's fault, because they've seen that
standards-based designs work identically, and non-standard designs
break similarly, in non-IE browsers.

A much smaller number of people know precisely why IE breaks things,
and even fewer know how to fix them in a consistent and reliable way.

This talk will explain the three underlying causes beneath scores
(possibly hundreds) of apparently different IE rendering 'bugs':

 1. The non-standard 'Box Model'
 2. Floats that aren't really Floats
 3. The proprietary hasLayout property

The primary purpose of the talk is to use an understanding of these IE
'features' to outline a comparatively simple set of procedures for
building robust page layouts that don't need constant tweeking to
accommodate new and alternative browsers.

If time permits, the talk will also cover a small number of unique
bugs and version-specific gotchas which are not caused by IE's big
three underlying design flaws ... including CSS hacks which can and
can't be relied upon.