Major display issue in IE8

[graphicz]

Hi Guys - Please shine a light on this for me.
http://www.hirstsculptures.co.uk/ displays fine in Chrome and Firefox but in IE it is a disaster. However it previews OK in IE on my local machine.

I have removed irrelevant styles from the Actinic stylesheet and can't see any dodgy looking widths. I tried containing the whole thing in a fixed width table but that produced different anomolies and rather defeats the object. Both container and inner are given width width:960px !important as well as *html entries and with <!--[if IE]> in the header.

I am pretty glum about this.

Thanks guys - Jonathan

[leehack]

Comments will get stripped out unless you have uncompressed html selected, i never use the separate IE stylesheet hacks, but i'm sure actinic will screw them over if compressed is still selected in design > design options.

[graphicz]

Hi Lee
You are a genius, unticking the compress box cured the issue - thank you.
How do you deal with IE problems without the so called 'hacks'?

[leehack]

I don't really encounter any IE problems nowadays to be honest, i find 7 & 8 very similar. Occasionally 6 does not play ball but i can talk to that direct in the main stylesheet via the html hack. I always use IE myself and design to IE, so perhaps because i do that, i don't get as many IE problems. I then cross browser things at the end. Maybe the steps i undertake to get IE looking as i wish, are often enough for all other browsers. The answer is i don't really know why not, but i've never once used them.

[Duncan Rounding]

LIkewise, I rarely have issues with IE. I develop in FF and then rework a bit in IE6 but I stick to pretty standard simple code that I find works well 95% of the time. It's very unusual if I have problems with IE7 or 8.

[graphicz]

I tend to use basic Dreamweaver layouts as a start point for my designs, on this occasion "2 column fixed, left sidebar, header and footer (twoColFixLtHdr.css)" so I would say that was pretty simple code.
I stripped out all the hacks and reintroduced them one by one. The hack the site needed was the one Dreamweaver includes in its layouts by default, ie this one:
<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
.twoColFixLtHdr #mainContent { zoom: 1; }
</style>
<![endif]-->
The problem was that Actinic removed this bit of code causing the diabolical rendering.
Thanks Guys especially Lee, I can put the prozac back in te draw for another day!!!
Cheers! J