IE5 disappearing/reappearing content

The site http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/ has a problem in IE5.0 - on initial
load, it seems to work fine. On following any link, a lot of the
areas disappear (anything absolutely positioned and anything floated,
as far as I can tell). If that page is then refreshed, however, the
content all reappears and it displays correctly.

If a page is refreshed so it displays, a link followed, 'back' used to
go to the first page, it displays wrongly until refreshed again.

I can't find any reference to this bug searching anywhere, either, but
I'm assuming that I'm just looking for the wrong keywords.

Happens, as far as I can tell, on every page in that site. Some of
the pages don't validate (yet) but the ones that do have the same
problem. If I drop the doctype and push IE6 into quirks mode it copes
fine.

I don't have a version of IE5.5 available to test with either, but
last time I checked it worked fine, though the template has changed
slightly since.

If anyone could point me in the right direction.

Thanks

(Other comments on the design, etc, appreciated, obviously)

--
Chris

Brian <usenet1 (AT) mangymutt (DOT) com.invalid-remove-this-part> writes:

Chris Morris wrote:
The site http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/ has a problem in IE5.0 - on initial
load, it seems to work fine. On following any link, a lot of the
areas disappear (anything absolutely positioned and anything floated,
as far as I can tell). If that page is then refreshed, however, the
content all reappears and it displays correctly.

IE5.x/win cannot do position: fixed. But what's really deplorable is

Don't have any position: fixed lines in the stylesheets, though.

that it pretends it can. (The correct behavior is to ignore what it
cannot do.) At a minimum, drop the position: fixed, or hide it from

Where is it? Can't find it.

MSIE/win. Further, IIRC, MSIE has problems with links position:
absolute.

I've been working on getting the problem down to a minimal testcase
where it still exhibits. I have one that looks pretty identical where
it works properly, and that has absolutely positioned links in it.

Now to look through and see what the differences between the two are.

Thanks

--
Chris

Chris Morris <c.i.morris (AT) durham (DOT) ac.uk> writes:

The site http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/ has a problem in IE5.0 - on initial
load, it seems to work fine. On following any link, a lot of the
areas disappear (anything absolutely positioned and anything floated,
as far as I can tell). If that page is then refreshed, however, the
content all reappears and it displays correctly.

And the reason is: In certain circumstances, IE 5 will parse parts of
stylesheets inside @media print {}

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. If, as I did, you put a few
display: none in that bit, it makes it very obvious that it's got
something wrong.

Oh well.

Thanks

--
Chris