Simon Willison’s Weblog

IE6, italics and horizontal scrollbars

9th April 2003

And the prize for freakiest CSS bug in the universe goes to... IE6! I was having a problem with the new design and a horizontal scrollbar occuring in IE6 for no readily apparent reason (the same bug had plagued my previous design as well). Bill Simoni on CSS discuss pointed out that the scrollbar wasn’t appearing on the comment / entry pages. After an extensive trial and error session I tracked the problem down to the fact that my blockquotes were in italic. If I removed the font-style: italic property from the blockquote declaration, the horizontal scrollbar vanished. No other changes were needed.

Truly bizzare.