I have been doing some customization to the wordpress theme I have using for this blog. The original theme was too mono-colored and the link color was hard to see. And of course I wanted my own header.
Many blog themes put the title of your blog both as the page title tag and also as a H1 somewhere as text in your header. This was fine with me but I wanted to have it display in a smaller font size to be more compatible with my custom header and not overrun my graphic.
So I went into the css of the blog theme and found the id tag (called “h1”) that specified the size in “em” and picked a smaller size.
It looked great on firefox, but on IE7 the size was unchanged. Furthermore I had also changed the link color from a barely distinguishable grey to a dark red with a command to underline the link on hover. Again worked great on Firefox 3, totally ignored on IE7.
With some help from my webdesigner friend from talksure, we figured out the problem. For the blog title, the theme not only enclosed the text in a div tag specifying the id “h1”, but it also had additionally enclosed the text in h1 tags (confusing .. but they *are* different). Of course the css had a larger size specified for the h1 tag. What was happenning was Firefox gave the div tags priority .. but IE7 gave the regular h1 tags priority.
A similiar problem explained the link color problem.
If you have conflicting tags, the behavior by IE and Firefox is likely to be different.
We think the reason that the title was enclosed in both a div tag and a h1 tag was to give the search engines a recognizable H1. And it makes sense this would be the blog title. However for now, the H1’s are removed so that my blog looks the same on all browsers.
