On Mon, 30 Jun 2003 00:07:36 -0700, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com gave utterance to the following:
Richard Grevers wrote:
I don't use MSIE for anything other than checking pages to see how many hacks I have to work in to make IE behave, but in all of my time reading HTML groups and forums where the standard advice is to use a fully-qualified DTD, I have never heard mention of such a bug. Are you sure that there isn't some other markup error in the Wikipedia pages which is combining to create the effect in IE?
Here's a minimal test case:
http://leuksman.com/misc/with-dtd.html http://leuksman.com/misc/without-dtd.html
It's got a single <div> with the style 'position: absolute' applied.
Hmm, I get the opposite effect (with the standards-mode DTD it selects everything between the cursor and the end of the document!)
I've never looked closely at the wikipedia markup - does it have everything positioned? What seems to be happening is that because there is no content in the general flow of the page, the body ends right at the top. THis can be illustrated with the standards version of your test file by adding a single <p> with a line of text following but outside the positioned div. The text will overlap - don't worry about that for now, but notice that selection is normal when you are in the first line of the positioned div and problematic below that (below the end of body).
Layouts where every element is positioned seldom work smoothly, and I'm sure this can be done more tidily by other means. I'd be happy to investigate but am in the middle of moving house 700km away, so it will be a fortnight before I can get to it.