'Disappearing' blocks of text & lists in IE

Good fix for an annoying IE bug which causes blocks of text to 'disappear' - usually when above or below a list (with the bullet points forced outside the div)...

Those familiar with IE's propensity to "disappear" protruding content know that applying {position: relative;} to the protruding element can sometimes make it display properly. In fact, the bullets are really still there in IE6, but that browser has a well known difficulty with showing content when it is forced outside of its container, usually as a result of applying negative margins. Although these bullets are not your typical box content, they are connected to the list items, and are clearly being forced to display outside of the DIV container, so this IE bug is at least being semi-consistent.

details here

Quirks vs Standards Mode - what's the difference?

Great post by Tedster on Webmasterworld about Quirks Mode vs Standards Mode...

" There's been some question (sometimes a lot of questions) about what quirks mode is, and the parallel question, what standards mode is.

Up until version 6 browsers, there was a lot of non-standard rendering built into user agents. A lot of this behavior didn't conform to the W3C rendering recommendations at all, but it was what we worked with and we got very used to it.

And then came the move to standards, with Document Type Declarations (DTD) and all that. But how can new browsers handle those legacy pages all, over the web that depend on "quirky" behavior in order to look good?

That became the question, and the answer is "quirks" mode.

If a browser sees a full DTD as the FIRST element of a document, including the W3C URL for the details, then it renders the page in "standards" mode. Because standards are still relatively young, there is some variation from one browser to another, but it's usually minor.

But if a browser sees no DTD, or a partial DTD, then it goes into "quirks mode", which essentially means rendering the page the wrong way, but the way we were used to up until version 6".

Microsoft will have a better search engine than Google in 6 months

Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.

"What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant," he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.

Story here

One response from RichTC on the Webmasterworld forum:

" I do wish they would cut the PR BS. Lets see them get the basic deep indexing and half relevent serps right first - before they start claiming they can knock Google off the number 1 spot in 6 mths. Currently its all pie in the sky, the results are dire, their reach is dire and their search bot is currently next to hopeless - making a statement like that is a pure pipe dream imo and not even remotely likely in another two years let alone 24wks!"