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3 Ways to Get Rid of Spaces in List Item Navigation in IE6

January 17, 2008 | Tags for this entry: CSS, ie6, web design

If you’ve ever tried to create an all-css navigation for your website, then you’ve seen it: dreaded spaces when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. This article will outline 3 different ways that you can get rid of these spaces in vertical list item navigation. And in the usual Belafonte style, these solutions are hack-free. (Who❤you?!)

Let’s start with a test navigation. We’ll jump right to the part where we’ve completed the navigation’s XHTML and CSS. Copy the following code into your own document if you want to follow along.

CSS

body {
	font: normal .9em Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
	background: #FFF;
	color: #FFF;
}
#sideNav {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	list-style: none;
	width: 200px;
	border: solid 1px #000;
}
#sideNav li {
	margin: 0;
	margin-bottom: 1px;
	background: #CCC;
}
#sideNav li a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #FFF;
	padding: 5px 3px;
	background: #000;
	display: block;
}

HTML

<ul id="sideNav">
	<li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">About</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Portfolio</a></li>
	<li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

This code is designed in the way that most nav lists would look. Also, most designers would want their links to change on rollover. Since IE6 does not recognize :hover pseudo classes when applied to any element that’s not the a tag, we have cannot simply apply the hover to the li tag. Therefore, in order to achieve the rollover, we went ahead and applied display:block to the link so that the rollover color will fill the entire button area.

This is where the problem comes in. If we apply a background color (yellow) to the li element, we can see that the gap that appears below the link element has something to do with either the outside of the a or the inside of the li.

Above: Test menu in IE6 after display:block applied to links. Notice the yellow from list items area showing between block-level links.

Space Removal Method 1: Define Border-Bottom

I came up with this solution a few years back and found this to be the simplest fix for the problem: add a border to the bottom of the li element. If your navigation has divisions between the links, then this is a perfect fit. You see how we have a margin-bottom:1px; applied to the list item? We can simply write in border-bottom:solid 1px #FFF; and eliminate the margin-bottom property. So, we still get the one-pixel white separation, and our gaps disappear in IE6. Success!

Space Removal Method 2: Define Link Width

One of my theories about where the gap comes from is that I imagined there to be an unseen hard return at the end of the link. In my vision, this hard return gets dropped down below the link when display block pushes the link all the way edge to edge. With that in mind, I decided to see what would happen if I reduced the width by one pixel or even made it match the width of the containing element.

So, I added width: 200px; to the a to exactly match the width we defined for our nav as a whole. (You could also use width: 100%; but sometimes that doesn’t work.) If my theory of why this happens is close, then this would keep the line return from dropping down below the link. BAM! It worked! The caveat here is that if you have any left/right padding applied to the link element, compliant browsers will add that to the total width. So, if you go with this method, you’ll have to adjust for that accordingly. (My preferred method is to send different widths to each browser using conditional comments for IE.)

Notice how, since we have 3 pixels of padding applied to both sides, defining the links’ width as ‘200px’ results in a 206-pixel width in compliant browsers.

Space Removal Method 3: IE Whitespace Fix Using Floats

After a long time of using the methods described above, I came across some prett useful information: this phenomenon has a name. It has been dubbed the “IE Whitespace Bug”. If I had known that, I could have just looked it up online and moved along. (It’s OK. I ain’t mad.) Anyway, when I did a search for solutions on this bug, I found tons of hacky “solutions”. Some involved commenting out the space after the li, others had a couple of Tantek-styled backslashes. {shudders}

I found this one at Jon Hicks‘ website, which involves floating and clearing the list item surrounding the link. In an IE6-specific conditional stylesheet, I make sure to include the following in my rule for the navigation li:

#sideNav li {
	float: left; 	/* IE WHTESPACE BUG */
	clear: left;	/* IE WHTESPACE BUG */
	width: 200px; 	/* IE WHTESPACE BUG */
}

Note: it’s always good practice to add notes to remind you why you added something. This way, if you choose to go a different route to solve this bug, you know which declarations to remove.

A few things to understand about this method: The width must be defined on the list item once it’s floated. If it’s not, it will collapse down onto the text that it contains. Also, the containing element must be floated as well, since only floated elements can wrap to contain other floated items. Since this is probably a sidebar navigation, it will likely be floated already, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

I know that there are lots of solutions presented to fix gaps in IE6. These are the ones that I choose since they don’t require much to remember and don’t use hacks.

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