A half dozen readers have now written in responding to our query on this problem (see Jul. 11), and we’re pretty sure we understand it now. It seems to afflict users of older browsers that cannot handle newer implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) such as those used in Movable Type.

In fact, we replicated the problem ourselves by calling up the site on an ancient Netscape 4.79 Navigator browser. Typically, in this kind of failure, the links on the main (left) column are unusable while the links on the right (blogroll, etc.) column will work as usual. Browsers of this vintage will have problems displaying many sites of recent design; for example CorpLawBlog shows the same links-don’t-work problem.

What to do? We begin with reader-side fixes: 1) upgrade to a more recent browser (we assume this is the best advice for most readers); 2) Some noncurrent browser versions (such as Opera’s) have a toggle-view switch by which users can make the links workable, though possibly at the cost of making the display look even more jumbled. 3) At Tantek ?elik’s site there is a “Toggle CSS style sheets” button which you can drag to your toolbar or favorites section, achieving the same effect (sounds promising, but we haven’t tried and can make no guarantees). 4) Another reader writes: “It’s not a major problem for me; I work around it by looking for the entry in the ‘Recent Entries’ section, where the links work.”

Then there are fixes that could be installed on our side. One brute-force method, which we don’t care for, would be to stop displaying in columns altogether, relegating the blogroll and other permanent links to the bottom beneath all the recent blog posts. Another reader suggests that we install the tantek.com “Toggle CSS style sheets” button ourselves in a visible location, which we assume would increase our page size and thus load time. A third reader suggests that we tinker with our own CSS file as follows: “Either delete ‘position:relative;’ or comment it out (replace with ‘/*position:relative;*/’).” But we’re wary of tinkering with the code unless we understand all the effects of doing so.

Right now, we’re inclined to recommend that readers try one of the reader-side methods outlined above if they have this problem, which will have the incidental benefit of making many other sites more usable as well. We’ll try to keep an open mind about the possible fixes to be done on our side, though.

P.S. Our original correspondent from the House of Representatives writes to say that his office updated its browsers and now all the links on this site work fine.

Filed under: blog mechanics