Comments on: Dot Dot Dash

By: Coos

Coos — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 22:56:32 +0000

Wow! You know I wondered, but thought I was going mad! Good to see that it's not me! Please keep up all the hard work, you truly ARE making the Web a better place... Microsoft will catch up eventually ;) Coos

By: web

web — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:31:41 +0000

I am a IE6 user. And after months of seeing dashed lines instead of dotted ones, I think they have grown on me.

By: eric

eric — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 07:54:00 +0000

Dan – you may know this, but if you want to apply a style only to IE6, you can set the links to work like this:
a {border-bottom: 1px dotted;}
* html a {border-bottom: 1px solid;}
I don’t know what the reasons are (they’re lost in someone else’s blog, for sure) but to the best of my knowledge the ‘* html’ only affects IE6.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 18:06:56 +0000

Cool tidbit Anne… already bookmarked :)

By: Pierce

Pierce — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:40:42 +0000

I also find that 1px dashed borders, when rendered on a colour background in my IE6/Windows, look like the line colour over white, regardless of the background colour.
EG: A black dashed border on a purple background appears to be a white and black dashed border. Sound familiar?
I think it could be a local bug. I haven’t encountered it anywhere else. Irritating though. Incredibly ugly, as you can imagine.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 03:27:38 +0000

aliotsy – very interesting. Thanks for that info. Makes more sense now, that it’s only botched when at 1px width.
I also like the idea of showing IE a solid line instead.

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 00:05:39 +0000

Why not just change the border-style?
body>h1,div>h1{ /* selectors should contain no space if you don’t want IE5.0 to apply the rule [related]. */
border-bottom-style:dotted;
And I also like to use “thin” instead of “1px”, but again IE messes it up.

By: zlog

zlog — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 22:08:43 +0000

h1 {
border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
}
body > h1, div > h1 {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #000;
}
that’s what i do, especially handy for links

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 22:04:26 +0000

You know, that’s always been what’s ticked me off the most!
I use dotted borders a whole lot in my designs, and the ugliness of dashed ones actually makes me rethink the decision.
I still think that using background-image is sort of a hack, but then, if a “hack” is the only way to get around such an obvious bug, then maybe its not a hack anymore ;)

By: aliotsy

aliotsy — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 22:03:26 +0000

This is an interesting phenomenom, really. IE actually DOES render dots instead of dashes, only not for when you set your border-width to 1px.
But since most people set their borders to 1px, many simply assume that IE does not render dots at all.
I learned this by accident while working on Computer Tutor. Granted, large dots aren’t pretty, but they ARE dots.