Website in IE Shows Last Letter or Word of Text, but is Fine in Firefox

There are many things that will cause a site to display properly in Firefox but not in IE (especially in IE6). One of the surprise reasons that this may happen is due to HTML comments.

The problem you get is that while viewing a site with Internet Explorer only, you see the last letter, letters, or words of your text in the wrong place on the page. If you test the site with firefox or opera, there’s no problem. So why is this happening?

The reason is because Internet Explorer doesn’t do well with too many HTML comments in one area. If you are using Dreamweaver Templates, Dreameweaver adds comments to delineate the template region starting and end points. Now if you go ahead and add some more commented text (e.g. for notes for yourself, code notes, or even just content that’ s ‘on hold’ for now), IE will incorrectly render the text that is nested within the comments.

The solution is to one by one, remove some of the HTML comments. You can try to combine them if possible, or put the comments elsewhere. Once you remove enough of the comments (e.g the actual tags –>, you will find that the text now displays normally.

It’s a frustrating bug to figure out, as you’d never expect that comments (which I encourage people to OVERuse), are the source of the problem!