margin: 0 auto; not centering in Internet Explorer?

Posted by Jamie on September 18, 2009 Leave a comment (1,606) Go to comments

The other day, I had chopped up a design.  Sliced and diced if you will.  I proceeded to creating the HTML once all of the images were sliced up.

Things were going great.  As per usual I began designing in Mozilla to use Firebug to tweak the CSS and HTML.  Once I finished the design, I proceeded to test in Chrome, Safari, and of course, Internet Explorer.

Every browser but Internet Explorer was working perfectly, what gives?

The worse part is, I know I’ve had this problem before.  If you’re like me, you may have worked on 100s of different projects and they all start to blend together because you’ve done this here and that there.

Luckily, I was actually able to remember what the problem was!  I forgot my DOCTYPE at the top of my file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”   “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

Add that bad boy to the top of your file, reload and voila, Internet Explorer now loads the web site like every other browser does!

This may not be the only issue that you see without a DOCTYPE and Internet Explorer.  Sometimes it may be a spacing issue, things wrapping incorrectly, etc…  The route of the cause will, most likely, be a missing DOCTYPE.

Cheers.

Share

Other useful articles

CSS, ,
Leave a comment ?

1,606 Comments.

  1. Kevin October 12, 2009 at 9:39 am

    DUDE, THANK YOU! I was getting ready to go to war with my IE browser. I somehow missed updating the doctype from the default that is given when creating a new page in Edit Plus.

  2. Twinkie November 20, 2009 at 3:16 pm

    Thank you! I can never remeber those doc types by memory, so for simple documents I always used to leave them out. Needless to say, I had a lot of headaches with Internet explorer and other browsers. Thank you for the tip.

  3. Kathy December 9, 2009 at 6:03 am

    Thanks – that saved me some time :)

  4. ConnorJack December 31, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    Thank you. I was searching my brain for some answer and it was as simple as that. You saved me from starting all over again.
    THANK YOU

  5. Bruce January 13, 2010 at 6:34 am

    Thx, man!

  6. Apology March 12, 2010 at 7:15 am

    thanks bro it helps. after an hour fighting with my IE browser at last i manage to fixed it.

  7. Robert March 26, 2010 at 11:14 am

    God, I was wondering why my notepad website was giving me such a head ache.

    Thank you very much!

  8. Ian May 16, 2010 at 5:02 pm

    Of course, leave it to IE to hold us to the most stringent of xhtml markup standards, and yet until version 9.0 they don’t even comply with css2.
    Thanks a lot for this advice, centering blocks id always the most anoying, and this just saved me quite a bit of time.

  9. MHK June 8, 2010 at 10:42 am

    Thanks for sharing this .
    This is very helpful to every designer

  10. jnjn June 17, 2010 at 10:29 am

    ahah thanks, how could i miss that.

  11. Ram August 28, 2010 at 12:55 am

    Cooooooooool Bro.
    Thanks

  12. Alexander December 1, 2010 at 12:19 am

    You very good man. My mind blow out with this problem. You save me, realy…

  13. Bo Lane December 14, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    Dude, if I could kiss you I would. I was racking my brain and completely forgot about the DOCTYPE. Thanks for the reminder.

  14. supra shoes December 17, 2010 at 1:42 am

    Hi, this is a tutorial as i like : easy to follow for an awesome result.
    I’m gonna use it for sure ! Go on.

  15. Khadijah March 30, 2011 at 6:24 pm

    amazing! I was prepared to spend a couple of hours..turns out to be a couple of minutes!
    Thank you

  16. Khadijah March 30, 2011 at 6:25 pm

    Amazing! I was prepared to spend a couple of hours…with this I spent a couple of minutes…!
    Thanks…

  17. Shmitt April 6, 2011 at 8:10 am

    Thanks a lot, it saved my site. Cheers and keep the good work !

  18. MrPeter1985 April 25, 2011 at 12:22 pm

    I checked and my zbench already has that in the header, but I still have that issue.

    Could you take a peek at it?

    The rest of my site is fine except for the Blog.

    Everything is correct in FF and Chrome. TIA

    -Pete

  19. YES! April 29, 2011 at 2:04 pm

    THANKYOU SO GOD DAM MUCH! I’m so glad i stumbled upon this

  20. Mens Gucci shoes May 27, 2011 at 9:36 pm

    This is a very good start, to write such an article to share with you, should be very grateful to the author, put a lot of us. Able to voice our opinions. This is a good theme, analysis of the good people has strong feelings. For me, this article has influenced me greatly, very good. I really appreciate!

  21. tony June 11, 2011 at 9:32 am

    Oh, you are a life saver.. I’ve just wasted about 2 hours trying to figure that oug..

Leave a Comment

Buy one of my books