Comments on: Internet Explorer Bug Fix: Disappearing Positioned Anchors

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:26:58 +0000

Thank you for saving my monitor from a well-placed Judo chop this morning.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:12:22 +0000

I’d recommend using a real (transparent) background image, rather than a made up filename. Otherwise your apache error logs are going to be filled with requests for “fake_image.gif”

Just a thought.

By: gojo

gojo — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:18:08 +0000

thanks a lot, Rob.

By: AJ

AJ — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:50:53 +0000

I was incorrect in saying the first tag is the one used for the main meta tag keyword, sorry. With your plugin, it goes alphabetically, so no choice but to have bug as the first keyword.

Which is a shame really, the word bug is not what you would want this page optimized for is it?

regarding the use of transparent images. Maybe you will do a post sometime on the png fix for IE6? Im sure that is something people will find useful, and it would work in well with the info that you have here. Thanks, and keep up the good work.

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:02:43 +0000

Another perpetration of the myth…an H1 tag should go in the
Header. NOT. Why do so many people think that is a great idea? H1 shows that it’s the most important and relevant heading for your content. Ideally, it should contain the main keyword that you are optimizing your page for,and that keyword should also be contained within the filename, and within the first paragraph or so of your main content. Oh yes, and the title of course.

Assuming you want to optimize your page correctly, that is.

As a matter of interest…do you want THIS page to rank well for the word bug, or for something like “IE bug fix”? If you used “IE bug fix” as your first tag for the post, then your SEO plugin would pull that keyphrase for your first meta tag keyword, instead of “bug” which is what it has done now.

You have some great content on this site, but I do have to disagree with your views on using H1 in the header. Just because wordpress might do this by default, doesn’t make it best practice, IMO.

I realize that Matt Cutts has said that using more than one H1 on a page isn’t necessarily bad, as long as you have a logical reason for doing so. But in this case, what logical reason is there? Do you want this particular page to rank well for “css newbie”, as thats what your first H1 tag contains.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:26:32 +0000

Thanks, this post helped me solve my problem. Thanks for sharing the love.

By: rajf

rajf — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:49:10 +0000

Very useful article. I encounter this more and more as I’ve begun refencing images in HTML rather than backgrounds for buttons. This allows me scale the image along with text.

Link

The cost is an extra div but hey I get the effect I want.

Probably better to refernece a transparent gif rather than a fake URL to avoid generating 404 errors.

By: webweaver

webweaver — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:25:05 +0000

Craaazy! I was tearing my hair out for a whole day on a bug similar to this, and this page provided a solution.

I had an absolutely-positioned span inside an absolutely-positioned span inside an anchor link – jQuery tooltip madness with curved corners – and in both IE6 and IE7 the inner span was resolutely refusing to display any background at all. I was basically trying to do “sliding doors” with absolutely positioned divs. Works in FF, not in IE.

Your article showed me that it was the anchor tag causing the problems, not the absolutely positioned spans themselves. Move them outside the a tag, tweak the jQuery to reference them in their new location and WOOHOO! It works! And it’s only taken me (literally) 12 hours to figure out the solution and make it work.

Thanks for your help!

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:26:07 +0000

Adding a border works well. You set “border-color: transparent” ( or “border: 1px solid transparent”).

By: Darek Rossman

Darek Rossman — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:23:46 +0000

Yea I checked and it should work…

I think your original problem was that you were hiding the span inside the anchor, which did make the anchor empty…

On my site I use an anchor and absolutely position it over top of my logo, and everything works as expected.

a { position: absolute; display: block; height: xx; width: xx text-indent: -9999px; }

This works in my case as my logo img is a background img inside another div…it’s pretty accessible too, its essentially like using an image map to define clickable areas, but the code is clean and semantic…

tho by no im sure youve solved the problem an then some as this post is a couple weeks old. Anyway…maybe it helps