Its definitely an understatement to say that Internet Explorer 6 isnt much liked in the web design and web development community and while alot of template clubs have stopped supporting IE6 in their template releases and the uptake of other browsers seems to be growing considering the latest IE6 security issue, there are still some simple tools that you can use to track down why something is happening in ie6 and not other browsers. The first thing I check when troubleshooting ie6 is the w3c html validator.

The main culprit for IE6 only weirdness are errors or code fragments in the markup.

Firefox and Safari tend to cope ok with these errors and almost intuitively figure out what you meant even though the markup is fragmented - IE6 is not an intuitive browser and cant cope with the fragmentation so it more or less tries to render what it reads.

Errors in the markup that affect ie6 only normally come from two distinct sources and both will show up in the validator.

Microsoft word source code pasted into the content item.

Pasting from Word and not sanitising it will leave all sorts of code fragments in the markup and IE6 (bless its heart) will try to render them for you. This issue is easily solved and prevented by using the paste from word option in our Joomla content editor of choice - JCE. JCE happily removes all of the code fragments from Word but leaves the formatting.

Orphaned elements in a module or content item.

A truncation script such as the word count feature in a slideshow truncating the html early or poorly marked up content items that miss closing divs may leave orphaned html elements and will show up in the validator. The validator shows these errors as xml or parsing mismatch errors that basically mean that the number of opening tags does not equal the number of closing tags on the page.

The ease in which you fix this issue really depends on the complexity of the page you are dealing with. if you have a lot of modules or content then its going to take you longer to find the root of the cause but its not impossible. Depending on the markup the validator points to the starting div that doesn't have a closing div but sometimes there are no identifiable tags that help you to see where the issue starts from.

If thats the case then I normally start unpublishing modules that control the output of the content and recheck the validator once they are unpublished. If that fails then I unpublish the content that might be rendered on the page via either modules or the content itself.

IE6 may well be the bane of the designer / developer but simple troubleshooting tips like this will hopefully reduce the time drain that normally represents browser testing in internet explorer 6.