I do not often have a use for the select element in front end web design. In this case, however, I was creating a user interface for a back end product control panel. It needed to be very compact with a lot of options packed into a small place. I ran into a problem when I needed to group four select elements together. The select elements all needed to be set to multi. Everything was fine with the exception of Internet Explorer 7 (big surprise!). IE would “leak” the contents of the select element outside of the element spilling into the surrounding div whenever it was floated in a div.
I have not yet discover the exact conditions under which this happens as I was in a time crunch.
- No more leak from the select element!
I spent about 20 minuets searching the Internet for someone who had come across the same problem but found nothing. So I thought I had better post how I decided to deal with this. Before I go on, I would like to mention that I did find a very good post by Nicholas Rougeux, called “Check it. Don’t select it” . It is worth a look as it may be a better alternative in your case.
Cutting through all the “chase”, it boiled down to a rather simple fix. The only thing I could do was to encase the select multi in a div that had overflow:hidden. Note that this is not the setting of overflow:hidden on the select element set with multi. The overflow:hidden setting is on the div that immediately surrounds the select element set to multi. In this way, the garbage data that ie was leaking out from the element would be hidden away from view.
So, for what it’s worth, I hope this little post will help someone out there who is suffering from the woes of Internet Explore. Oh, and if you have any answers or better solutions, by all means contact me. I’m happy to share and be enlightened.