I run my website on several different computers for testing purposes. Needless to say everything works flawlessly when it comes to Chrome, FF, etc. But then there is IE! On my computer and a few others, which all have IE 9 Version: 9.0.8112.16421 64-bit Edition, the website runs smoothly and without errors. Ironically on the clients server, exactly where I need the website to run, this same version of IE 9 gives error SCRIPT5009: JSON has not been defined Code (markup): Now I have corrected that error but it also it doesn't render display: inline-block properly. It simply renders it as display: block. I hate to figure out what other things it will display wrongly. I can't even test it because I cannot recreate the same environment as my client has. The client is a big company and I cannot make them change their browser of preference or even re-install it. It is ridiculous I know but there are still companies that prefer to use IE 9. This has been a real mystery that I have been trying to solve for the last couple of days. The client is running the same operating system which is Windows 7, the same version of the same browser and still things look different. Could the issue be something with the browser settings. Please, can anyone help me with this?
Sounds to me like you've been jumping the gun on technologies not ready for primetime if you care about legacy IE. Big tip though on legacy IE... it can't make block-level tags be inline-block; you are best off either making it a float (not always an option) or setting an inline-level tag to inline-block (which does work). With things like lists as menus this often works out ok as you can set the LI to display:inline (basically stripping their formatting) and use the anchor inside it as your inline-block element. Of course though if you are putting multiple block-level tags like headings or paragraphs inside you're inline block, you're pretty much **** outta luck on legacy IE. That's why nonsense like trying to use inline-block to make columns is inherently broken thinking. Really though without seeing the code of the page you are trying to work with, it's VERY hard for us to give you much more than that in terms of meaningful advice. That said, I really don't like JSON... much like XML it's just so grossly inefficient and poorly supported, which is why when possible I try to make my own data formats for exchange. Even CSV if you know what the fields are is better supported, and if you can master ASCII control characters you can really put JSON or XML to shame in terms of performance... even if you do lose human legibility of the data. Which is the only real reason to USE JSON or XML, human legibility. The next re-re that calls either of those formats "machine readable" is getting my boot so far up their backside their tonsils will get stuck in my laces. (As someone who's hand assembled machine language I know what "machine readable" is, and those aren't it!!!)
Oh, and same versions of a browser acting different across machines is nothing new; I've already noticed IE11 differences between Windows 7 and Windows "giant middle finger to desktop users" 8. It's like the differences in Firefox between OSX and Windows (which is why I test both for my production code!) or how different font renderers between Win/Mac/*nix can radically change a fixed layout (another strike against fixed layouts) even when the same font is used/present! Part of why Apple pulled the plug on Safari for Windows -- it simply wasn't working the same and the ONLY real reason it even existed was for developers on Windows to test for Mac... not a great test when it doesn't work right and lags behind a year on updates. We're better off without it. All of this being why I consider VirtualBox a must-have; I've got VM's set up for Mountain Lion, Debian, XP, Win2k and Win 8 from a win7 host with mutliple versions of different browsers spread out across each because you pretty much have to TEST, TEST and TEST some more... and you'll quickly find that a lot of design concepts and methodologies are so broken cross browser (like inline-block on block-level elements) they become "not viable for deployment" At the same time, a lot of the 'fixes' people use are often more broken than just letting it gracefully degrade or use some other method for building the page. See IE conditional comments in the markup for loading CSS; 99%+ of the time people use them, it's more to sweep ineptitude under the rug than an actual viable fix that serves a legitimate purpose.