Unjustifiable Internet Explorer 7,8 and probably 9 as well

Posted by Tom Schultz on February 1, 2009 Leave a comment (1) Go to comments

I think we all know that Microsofts Internet Explorer has been a failure for…quite some time (Sorry Microsoft, just fix it already).  Internet Explorer 7 and 8 have made huge advances over version 6, however, there are still many flaws and I ran into an obscure one the other day.

This issue has to do with the  “text-align: justify” property.    My xhtml markup structure was something like this…

<p> (floated left)
     Some text in the paragraph
</p>
<p>
     Then a bunch of paragraphs that followed
</p>

So I had a single paragraph that was floated left that contained one extremely oversize character and then there were paragraphs that followed.
I also had set the paragraphs that followed to have the “text-align: justify” property.  The text was supposed to flow around the first paragraph that was floated.  This was working flawlessly in FireFox 3, but in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 it wasn’t wrapping the text around the floated paragraph element.

I took out the “text-align: justify” and everything worked perfectly as it should in both Internet Explorer 7 and 8 as well as FireFox.

So Internet Explorer must have some deep philosophical issue with justified text wrapping around other objects.  This seems strange since you see that a lot in printed media.

Anyway, I hope they fix this bug before Internet Explorer 8 becomes generally available., but I doubt it.

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