My site looks different when viewed with some web browsers
To correctly display a Sandvox site, a web browser must support the CSS standard. If a particularly old browser is used (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac), the site will either appear incorrectly, or without any styling at all.
All modern web browsers should be able to fully display Sandvox sites. Version of Internet Explorer 6 and earlier do have a few minor potential issues which are detailed in the headings "PNG Images" and "Graphical Text" below. If you suffer any other problems, please visit our support forum.
PNG Images
Internet Explorer version 6 and earlier will not properly display PNG images with transparency. To compensate, you could ask your site visitors to use an alternative browser (such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7), although this is probably not ideal! Instead, you are better off avoiding the use of transparent PNG images within your site.
There are two ways round this; You can use GIF images instead, or PNG images without transparency.
To replace a PNG image with a GIF image:
- Copy the image to the clipboard.
- Delete the image from your site.
- Paste the image into the Preview application.
- In Preview, choose "File → Save As…" and save the image in the GIF format.
- Add the GIF image to your site in place of the original.
It is important that you save the GIF images at the same size they will be displayed at. Sandvox must not have to resize any image since this will convert it to PNG and you'll be back to square one!
To remove the transparency from a PNG image:
- Copy the image to the clipboard.
- Delete the image from your site.
- Paste the image into the Preview application.
- In Preview, choose "File → Save As…"
- Save the image in the PNG format, making sure to uncheck the "Alpha" box.
- Add the new PNG image to your site in place of the original.
Page text styled one way in Firefox, not bold in Safari
Let's say for example that some text is bold in Firefox but not Safari. Look for a stray <b> tag in your raw HTML text. It must have a corresponding closing </b> tag or you will see different results in different browsers.
Safari ignores the unmatched tag, so nothing becomes bold.
Firefox makes everything on the page bold from that point on until it find a closing </b> tag. If it never finds the tag, the entire page will appear to be bold in Firefox, but plain text in Safari.
Graphical Text
Some designs make use of graphical text. When your site is published, any graphical text is actually turned into a PNG image. In order to allow Internet Explorer 6 users to read the text, Sandvox instead shows them a plain version of the text.
Thus, your site will look different to Internet Explorer users in this respect, but it should remain fully readable. For more information, please see the "Graphical Text" article.
Other Issues
If you are experiencing any other discrepancies when viewing your site in other browsers, please visit our support forum to report the issue.
