Comments on: 3 Pixels of Frustration

By: Ray Muirhead

Ray Muirhead — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 07:26:37 +0000

Muchas gracias for the double float technique! Works a treat.

By: Mike Funk

Mike Funk — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 21:01:20 +0000

I tried assigning heights of 1% to everything on the page and still it wouldn't do it. It wasn't until I found the comment above to float the left object to the left that I found a fix that worked. I just used the underscore hack: #leftFloat {_float: left;} and made sure to clear my floats with clear divs at the end. I tried the :after, etc. method of clearing and had trouble with it, so it's back to div style="clear:both;" for now.

By: Kevin Francis

Kevin Francis — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 04:20:29 +0000

I came accross this bug in my first ever css layout about a year ago. After taking a screen shot in WinIE I measured the 3px on the left and right of floated block level elements and came up with my own hack.
/* Hide form MacIE \*/
* html div#mydiv {
margin: 0 -3px;
}/* End hiding */
I searched google for ages looking for an answer and found nothing. At last someone has brought to light the 3px bug.

By: Jim Knight

Jim Knight — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 23:35:39 +0000

I recently found that the 3px jog became 4px in Win 2000 with the OS font size set to 140%. At 200%, it becomes a 5px jog. Anyone else see this?

By: flavio

flavio — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:44:11 +0000

Thank you, really. I noticed this bug a couple of weeks ago! Now I’ll try a workaround sure that I don’t allucinate…

By: Brian Andersen

Brian Andersen — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 00:26:38 +0000

I do pretty much everything with floats, so I’ve run into this, oh about a million times.
Not just with the infamous 3-pixel gap, but in just about every situation IE stalls production, and you’re not in the mood for endless bug tracking, that IE Win only hack is godsend.
Spread the word on the * html hack. God knows the world would be a safer place to use floats in if everyone knew it.

By: Fernando

Fernando — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 17:48:55 +0000

Phil: I’m with you on that one. I sat here all day yesterday working trying to get my sidebar to toggle on and off just with a stylesheet switcher. IE would not display the absolute positioned div with the buttons and I forgot my solution to it. I think for about half a second, I actually made a plot to destroy the Microsoft Corporation.
On topic: I have the 3px problem. But my div has no backgrounds or borders, so it isn’t noticable unless you use a Bookmarklet.

By: Phil Sherry

Phil Sherry — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 17:19:11 +0000

IE makes me want to commit violent crimes on a daily basis. sometimes, i think it would be easier to just wipe out everyone who doesn’t use a proper browser.

By: Rob Mientjes

Rob Mientjes — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 13:23:52 +0000

Heh, yes, the most notorious bug in IE to stop people using floats. Luckily, I found the Holly & John hack on my first layout with CSS + XHTML, so I was lucky.
And the question remains (as with every tiny bit of Internet Explorer): why?!

By: Jon Linczak

Jon Linczak — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 04:32:06 +0000

Wow, and here I thought that I was the first guy to find this because I couldn’t find it documented anywhere. I was finishing up my blog just so that my first post would be documenting this bug.
I always knew something was fishy on IE when my margin widths had to be extended a few pixels for it to work, but I never had to worry about such tight tolerances until a recent design I had to code. I brought it down to the 2 divs, one floated to the left, the other with the proper margin. I eventually found that floating both to the left worked the best for me.
But here’s my quandry – almost everything I have done in my CSS has been a float. So much so that I wonder if there’s something that says, “This is too much. Can’t you find a better way?” Don’t know if anyone else has had this feeling… Anyway, thanks for bringing this up, Dan!