Above the Fold: The Blog

As documented yesterday, I managed to get the ‘acorns’ in the left-hand navigation bar fixed but had to take them out of the right-hand bar because I couldn’t replicate the trick. A little midnight musings brought the answer.

The code for the left-hand navigation elements is adapted from gavlinne’s original suggestion on the webdev journal:

div#nav-left ul#nav {
padding: 0;
margin: 0 0;
list-style-type:none;
}

div#nav-left ul#nav li {
margin-left : 25px;
float : left;
}

/* Hide hack from IE5/Mac \*/
* html div#nav-left ul#nav li {
margin-left: 12px;;
}

div#nav-left ul#nav li a:link,
div#nav-left ul#nav li a:visited,
div#nav-left ul#nav li a:hover,
div#nav-left ul#nav li a:active {
color : #813817;
text-decoration : none;
display : block;
padding : 7px 5px 7px 35px;
margin: 0;
background: url(images/acorn01.gif) no-repeat left center;
}

div#nav-left ul#nav li a:hover,
div#nav-left ul#nav li a:active {
text-decoration : underline;
}

This all forced IE to see the ‘acorns’ my specifiying all the states of the a: tage and works perfectly well for a single-level navigation bar. In this blog, the right-hand navigation bar has multiple layers and for once IE displayed them as I intended when using this code, but Firefox didn’t. That’s actually a sign of IE playing up rather than Firefox, because Firefox quite rightly got confused by the float:left and sent things everywhere. The code above had an extra layer of ‘ul li’ added to anything that originally stated ‘ul li’, but there was nothing clearing those floats so the first layer of the list confused itself.

The trick was a slight adaptation below (in bold):

div#nav-right ul {
padding: 0;
margin: 0 0;
list-style-type:none;
}

div#nav-right ul li {
clear: both;
padding-top: 20px;
}

div#nav-right ul li ul {
padding-bottom: 20px;
}

div#nav-right ul li ul li {
margin-left : 25px;
float : left;
padding-top: 0;
}

/* Hide hack from IE5/Mac \*/
* html div#nav-right ul li ul li {
margin-left: 12px;
}

div#nav-right ul li ul li a:link,
div#nav-right ul li ul li a:visited,
div#nav-right ul li ul li a:hover,
div#nav-right ul li ul li a:active {
color : #813817;
text-decoration : none;
display : block;
padding : 7px 5px 7px 35px;
margin: 0;
background: url(images/acorn01.gif) no-repeat left center;
}

div#nav-right ul li ul li a:hover,
div#nav-right ul li ul li a:active {
text-decoration : underline;
}

That was the only adapatation needed and it worked like a dream. A little bit of fiddling with padding to ensure that the category headings don’t bump into each other, and the navigation is now working as intended in IE6, Firefox and Opera.

Although I suspect that it still explodes nicely in IE7.