Strange CSS Issue with older IE

[lprintz]

Hello all!

I mention ‘strange’ in that I’m comfortable working with old IE quirkiness but nothing this drastic.

Please take a look at the 404 page on this site (example http://www.americasjobexchange.com/len)

This page looks fine in Chrome, FF, and IE 10 however in IE 9 and older it completely blows up! It looks like a missing closing DIV or something major but what’s throwing me for a loop is the fact that it’s fine on other browsers! I’m at a loss…can anybody point me in the right direction?

Thanks so much!

[Paulie_D]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americasjobexchange.com%2Flen;No200=1

[Senff]

Remove the line that comes before the Doctype declaration. Nothing can come before <!Doctype..., not even a space or a blank line, or IE will go into quirks mode. Which is not what you want.

Who came up with that anyway?

<!--
Unless this text is here, if your page is less than 513 bytes, Internet Explorer will display it's "Friendly HTTP Error Message",
and your custom error will never be displayed.  This text is just used as filler.
This is a useless buffer to fill the page to 513 bytes to avoid display of Friendly Error Pages in Internet Explorer
This is a useless buffer to fill the page to 513 bytes to avoid display of Friendly Error Pages in Internet Explorer
This is a useless buffer to fill the page to 513 bytes to avoid display of Friendly Error Pages in Internet Explorer
-->

[Eric Gregoire]

To add to what @Senff mentioned, the comments before the doctype are probably causing the doctype to be ignored and I get no centering of the page container in IE8. If I remember correctly, IE8 is one of those that requires a doctype for the margin: 0 auto centering trick to work.

[lprintz]

Thanks Senff and Eric…that solved the problem!

NO idea where this code came from or why it was there but it’s clean now :)

[Ed]

As stated, you need to remove those comments at the top of the document and have the doctype declaration be on the first line.

You don’t need those comments at all, actually, because your page is ~3kb without them according to Chrome Dev Tools’ Network panel, so you’re well clear of that IE bug.

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