IE duplicating text bug

19th March 2006 by Jason C. Filed under: Web-development

Catchy title, huh? Well, I was putting the finishing touches to the Tricky Business website When I noticed something very strange.

When I viewed the site in IE, a bit of text was repeated underneath where it first appeared. I looked in the markup, and there was nothing there! It didn’t show up in Firefox either. So I started digging, and eventually found this article about the “IE duplicate characters bug”.

I had built the site with Dreamweaver templates, so I though my first port of call was to remove the template markup (lots of html comments). I opened up the site in Dreamweaver, and did an “Export without markup”. Thankfully, it worked.

My only problem now is that I have to edit the site with Dreamweaver markup in, then export it every time I want to publish it. Bummer. Trouble is, when anyone else wants to edit the site, they have to do this, too. If that’s someone who doesn’t deal with site development regularly, then this is a counter-intuitive and unnecessary obstacle to have to overcome. At least this post may help with awareness of the problem. If I can stop one person head-butting his monitor in frustration then I’ve done my bit. Thanks again, IE for making things harder than they should be.