Friday, September 25, 2009

IE6 Bug: Relative Box After Float Doesn't Show

Consider the following code where you have a floated element (in this case a label), followed by a div with position: relative, containing an input field with a width: 100%.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    <head>
        <style type="text/css">
            .label { float: left; }
            .div   { position: relative; }
            .input { width: 100%; }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <label class="label">Label</label>
        <div class="div">
            <input class="input" type="text"/>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>
The issue is that on IE6, the input field doesn't show:

This bug has been resolved in IE7, and you can easily work around it in IE6 by forcing the box to "have layout" (in IE, elements with position: absolute have layout, but elements with position: relative don't necessarily have layout). My favorite way for doing so it to add a *zoom: 1 on the box, which will give you the expected result:

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