So I finally got the categories list to display hierarchically – seems that in Word Press 1.5 setting the hide_empty argument to true (and it’s true by default so this means doing anything other than explicitly setting it to false) causes the categories list to get stuck on a non-hierarchical, sorted by ascending ID only setting. So now you get to see any categories that I thought I’d need but haven’t used yet.
Unfortunately, the hierarchical sorting reveals a bug in Internet Explorer’s CSS support. Yeah, another one. As you can see the first item in each child list is missing some styles. It was originally worse than this, the first item in the list (and all the other lists in the sidebar) and the first item in each sub-list, and the first item after each sub-list were all affected.
If you look at the source code you’ll see some peculiar code: <!--[if IE ]><li></li><![endif]–>. These empty list items are hidden inside MSIE only Conditional Comments so that anyone visiting the site without stylesheets won’t see them (they collapse to zero size in any stylesheet enabled browser and it’s next to impossible to disable stylesheets in IE) and in IE they act as the first list item and hence suck up the lack of styling.
But for some reason they work for the first and third cases listed above but not for the first item in each sublist. Bugger.
At some point I’m going to need to make a test case and identify the CSS properties that trigger the bug. With luck these will be something that can be rewritten or hidden from IE without blowing up the design.
I also fixed a long standing problem with Mozilla whereby the items in the sublists were being indented too far and some of the page background was shining through. Just a case of remembering that different browsers have different default styles for lists – some use margin and some use padding, some apply these to the <ul> element and some apply these to the <li> element.
But I haven’t been able to fix another Mozilla problem – the one pixel gap that appears after every fifth list item. The regularness of this suggests a rounding error of some sort but I have no idea what triggers it or how to avoid it. Bugger.
