It’s Microsoft who should be busting a gut to fix this, not you!

Amen, Ben. Coo-ee, Chris Wilson????

The fiddlyness of making the correct way work in IE is definitely a pain in the arse. And you’re right; regular folks creating fragment links to arbitrary locations will very often to fall foul of this bug in IE.

For fragment links to fixed locations (such as “skip to blargh” links) the resident web-head can make the right way work by understanding the hasLayout effect. So a lot of websites can avoid the invalid method entirely to feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves.

Using invalid markup to correct a browser bug is very hackish. It’s Microsoft who should be busting a gut to fix this, not you! But when the alternative is poor accessibility for people who have to use a keyboard, I’d agree this is the lesser evil and probably the best choice available in your particular circumstances.

Microsoft made big architectural changes to the rendering engine for some of the CSS bug fixes. Whatever internals cause this issue, they could fix it if they chose to.

There’s three inter-related reasons that I’ve chosen invalidity over “doing it right”:

1. he target for an inpage link is completely arbitrary; sometimes it’s an h2, and h4, thee third paragraph in a div, an unordered list, the third list item inside an ordered list inside a definition list … Almost impossible to ensure that the destination’s parents always have layout, while tabindex=-1 ensures that the destination does
2. Those who provide content aren’t webheads abnd can’t be expected to trace back layout; easier for them to add tabindex=-1
3. I need something reasonably straightforward for my successor when I go on to other projects; understanding hasLayout is a black art of necromancy. (I also have a gut feeling that it’s at the heart of the Trident engine that IE uses, so won’t be fixed until they rewrite the rendering engine completely. But that’s just speculation on my part.)

My understanding is that fragment links work in IE6 if the parent of the fragment hasLayout.

For example, Calthorpe Park School uses an <a> for the Site Menu since its parent <h2> hasLayout. For the main content, an id is applied directly to the <h2> since hasLayout is false (0) for that element but is true (-1) for the parent <div>.

If you could supply links to the pages, I could trace what the value of hasLayout and apply the compatible technique. Or you could use this knowledge to try sorting it yourself.

Probably if you dig deep enough you’ll find many more simular problems that you’d need to workaround too, and with each workaround you risk causing problems for an entire other group of users. It will much become like walking a mine-field. That’s why I am so against this kind of hackery, because it is a quest with no end…