Internet Explorer 8 Bug with Display: Table

Internet Explorer 8 bug with display: table

It turns out that, as suggested by some, IE's compatibility mode was triggered somehow.

I found out that it's because I'm running the page on an Intranet, and by default compatibility mode is enabled for Intranet websites.

This can be disabled by going to Tools > Compatibility View Settings and unchecking the Display intranet sites in Compatibility View box. Of course this is not something you necessarily want to ask all your users to do, so it was suggested to me to add

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

in the header, which works great.

More info on that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325%28VS.85%29.aspx

Internet Explorer 8 table cell width bug with colspan set

Here is my result for failed td width in IE8:

<table style="width: 100%;" border="1">
  <tr>
    <td style="width:auto;">td1</td>
    <td style="width:15px;">td2</td>
    <td style="width:20px;">td3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3" style="width:auto;">ds fasdf asdf asdf asdf asfd asf asdf asdf adf sadf asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf asfasdf dasf sdaf asd</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<!-- IE8 HACK  100% WIDTH -->
<table style="width: 100%;" border="1">
  <tr>
    <td style="width:100%;">td1</td>
    <td style="width:15px;">td2</td>
    <td style="width:20px;">td3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3" style="width:auto;">ds fasdf asdf asdf asdf asfd asf asdf asdf adf sadf asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf asfasdf dasf sdaf asd</td>
  </tr>
</table>

internet explorer 8 ignores width for 'display: table-cell' element

After adding the bounty, I ended up working around this problem by targeting my CSS to IE8. I was already using Paul Irish's technique of adding classes to the <html> element using conditional comments:

<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <html class="ie6 ielt9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7 ]>    <html class="ie7 ielt9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8 ]>    <html class="ie8 ielt9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9 ]>    <html class="ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <html class=""> <!--<![endif]-->

So all I had to do is add an extra CSS rule for IE 8 and lower:

.img-container { display: table-cell; }   /* IE9+ and other browsers */
.ielt9 .img-container { display: block; } /* IE8 and lower */

Coupled with the techniques for vertically centring images, this gives me a nice cross-browser solution.

How can I work around this IE11 layout bug related to table-cell, text-decoration, and padding?

Again a IE11 problem that seems so unusual. I see that the percentage padding is not even calculated and is not applied in the layout. However the text is still padded according to the padding percentage. So i would assume the text is positioned with the padding but after the positioning the percentage padding is "disabled".

I can't tell you why this happens. But if you really want to fix these you might want to use these quick fixes.

Use margin

Because the percentage bug only occurs on the padding of a table-cell, you can actually use a margin on the span itself.

span 
{
    margin-left: 10%;
}

and ofcourse reset the padding of the sides:

div.table-cell {
    display: table-cell;
    padding: 20px 0;
}

This "solution" is not as dynamic as with percentage padding on the table-cell itself.

Why not?

It's because the percentage takes is value from it's parent element, the table-cell. Where as the table-cell did take it's percentage value based on the tabel. Now when you would just use left-margin: 5%;. It would be half of the space as it should be. This is because it take the 10% on the table-cell width. Where the table-cell width is table width devided by its cells(table width / table cell).

So to fix that i did 5 times the amount of cells (5 * 2 in this case), which would result in the right percentage.

However this is not dynamic when you want to add more cells.

jsFiddle

Use border

Use border which its position is "reserved" before the padding is resetted.

Reserved border

span 
{
     border-bottom: 1px solid transparent;   
}

Change property that doesn't need re-calculation of position; color

div.table-cell-bug:hover span 
{
    border-bottom-color: black; 
}

Now note that there will still be no padding in the layout. As soon as a property is assigned which has not been calculated before the padding did reset(the same time the text position is determed) the positions will be re-calculated.

jsFiddle

I hope one of these quick fixes work for you.

I see you sended a bug report to MS. Keep us up-to-date when you get a reply, i would appreciate it :)

IE not coloring :before as table-cell, why?

This appears to be a bug in IE. If you inspect the element in IE 11 Developer Tools, you see all the declarations for the :before pseudo-element struck out (also e.g. font settings if you add them), but the display and content settings affect the rendering.

To circumvent this bug, it suffices in this simple case to set display: block as @BeatAlex suggests. In a more complicated situation, you probably need more complicated workarounds.

IE11 shows every { display: table-cell } element at a new line

I submitted a bug report to the IE development team and it has been accepted as the issue.

I'll update this post upon changing the status of the bug.

Internet Explorer 8 Bug with Display: Table