Body Content div Alignment Problems In IE6

Question

I am having alignment problems with a website I'm designing on IE6. It works great in all browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc.) including IE7, IE8 and IE9. Basically, I troubleshooted and found that there is 25 extra pixels that are being added to either the main body of the page or the right body column of the page (these are divs #body_box or #right_box in the JS Fiddle below). They should be displayed inline but instead the #right_box overlaps and is displayed underneath #body_box and floating to the right.

The way I know this is that I expanded the div #Complete_Layout to 1025px (as opposed to the 1000px that it's set at now) and that's when it worked in IE6. I tried 1026px and 1024px and it didn't line up. I checked the dimensions of the background images which are accurate and I even attempted to change the width of the two divs (body_box and right_box) to percentages (75% and 25%) but it gave the same result. I'm out of ideas on what else to try.

http://jsfiddle.net/cRcXq/

It should be noted that I am doing this in PHP and the body_box and right_box sections are part of include files (don't know if that changes anything). I've added a comment on the HTML of the JSFiddle on where index.right.php begins. Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

This looks like the infamous " IE 6 box model bug ," a well-known difference between IE 6 and other browsers from the time. Essentially, IE 6 counts the padding and the border as part of the width and height of an element, but any other browser from that time follows the same model as newer browsers.

Seriously, though, why are you designing a website for IE 6? It's ten years old and insecure, and it has less than 1% market share in the US. Microsoft has put up a website devoted to getting people off of IE 6. You wouldn't write code for Office 2000, or Mac OS 9, or PHP 3, so why are you developing code for a browser that was popular around the same time as those products?