help with IE5Mac (css, xhtml)

I've been having a hell of a time getting several of my sites to look right, or even render at all in Mac IE 5.0 and I've no idea why exactly. They seem to work just fine in Mac NS6, along with all the PC browsers I've tested them in (IE5, IE5.5, IE6, Mozilla, NS6, and Opera6 so far).

The first, and most awful is this:

http://www.boptart.com/gallery/ which shows nothing but a blank page in IE5 Mac.

The second is my blog, which just explodes in IE5Mac sending text all over the damned place:
http://metrobakery.boptart.com/blog/

I've a third, but it's just a positioning bug, and I assume that position isn't supported by that browser (which might explain the second problem) and isn't so terribly pressing.

They all three validate as either xhtml 1.0 or html 4.01 where appropriate. Some of the gallery (the first page) doesn't seem to validate anymore but I think I screwed that up by uploading an older version (it used to validate). The CSS validates too.

Any help is appreciated.

Even though it validates, you are using a fair amount of non-standard HTML, such as />

Macs are particularly fickle. And Mac IE 5 was notorious for being crap and not rendering CSS very well at all. As far as I remember it was particularly bad at any positioning done with CSS.

I don't think you're going to have a fun time getting it to work for that browser (I gave up entirely). Can you do a detection script to send those people off to a boring vanilla page?

Kersti

I've fixed the first page I had problems with by cleaning up every aspect of the code on all pages to be compliant with the standards. It may have also been the doctype, which was not of one of the official w3 doctypes. One of those may have done the trick.

It's becoming increasingly clear however, that Mac IE 5.0 just does not like positioning very well and if the site most affected by that were not my own personal site I would have to resort to a workaround, or just a danged table I guess (but then I couldn't say it was nigh-table free as that was the primary reason for making it in the first place).

Ahh well, I was just hoping this might be a known issue with a known solution. Thanks!