lines going through field labels and footer text on a page

[cnymike]

I have already contacted support directly and have not gotten a satisfactory solution so am posting this in the forum in the hopes that someone can better understand the problem that has surfaced on a client website.

This issue is mushrooming into several things as a result of running my site through CSS validation which reported numerous errors which I have fixed except for a single one that has to do with Gravity Forms and I quote "Line 110, Column 176: document type does not allow element "link" here
…nt/plugins/gravityforms/css/forms.css?ver=3.4.2' type='text/css' media='all' />"

Here is my problem...
I designed a site for a client and have viewed the site in multiple browswers and platforms. The client is reporting an issue with one of the pages on the site... not all the pages, just one of the pages and that page has a Gravity Form in the sidebar in a widget. My client says that the entire form has lines going across the form labels and lines going through the footer text. I could not see the problem on my Mac or my PC running Windows 8 and IE10. However when I went into Windows 8 Developer Tools and switched document mode to IE7, I was suddently seeing the lines too.

So I called my client and had him do the same thing. When he went in to Developer Tools, he said that his Document Mode was indicating IE7. When I instructed him to change the setting to IE8 or IE9, he did so and the lines disappeared. He then quit the browser, then restarted and visited his site again. Again the lines had returned.

Employment

Again, this issue occurs only on that page, not any of the other pages. And I have disabled the Gravity Forms plugin to remove the error that Gravity Forms was creating during validation to eliminate that as the culprit.

So what the heck?

At this point, the only thing that seems to be a likely prospect is the doctype being incorrect in some way. What else could explain that IE9 Developer Tools is showing the Document Mode to be IE7 even when that is changed to something else, the browser is quit and restarted and the lines return?  How would I change the doctype so ensure that it wasn't the culprit in all of this causing the Document Mode in the browser to resort to IE7 standards mode?

[nickthegeek]

Just as a follow up. I am continuing to help in the support desk on this. If you get a good solution here, please let me know. Thanks.

[And_or]

I was able to solve a similar situation once with whats described here...
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/62715/blog-page-not-loading-style-sheet-in-ie9

Could you also not consider putting the form on the page instead of the sidebar, and would that solve the issue ? The current location of the form will be troublesome on small screens anyway...

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Simplicity is not Simple Webtaurus

[cnymike]

I think that the Form is irrelevant because I've removed the widget and even deactivated Gravity Forms during my testing of this and the lines remain.

I think that the article you pointed to is more relevant to what is causing this than anything else. But I don't know how to troubleshoot that. Clearly though something is causing the browser to go into an improper mode cuasing those lines to display on IE but only on that employment page. None of the other pages show the lines.

 

I'm pulling my hair out.

[cnymike]

OK, the cause of the lines has been determined. There was a little snip of code which was at the end of the last paragraph on the page
<code>del datetime="2010-11-03T17:48:50+00:00"<code>

I have no idea where it came from but it was causing the browser, perhaps due to doctype, to mess up what followed on the page thus the lines appearing. I removed that code and everything seems to be fine now.

This topic can be marked resolved.

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