IE: nth-child() using odd/even isn't working

Question

My table (that works perfectly on Chrome, FireFox and Opera) is not displaying correctly on Internet Explorer.

The background remains white! (I am using IE-8)

CSS code:

/*My Table*/
.my_table{
border-collapse:collapse;
font:normal 14px sans-serif,tahoma,arial,verdana;
margin:5px 0;
}

.my_table th{
color:#fff;
background:#5E738A;
border:1px solid #3C5169;
text-align:center;
padding:4px 10px;
}

.my_table td{
color:#555;
border:1px solid #C1CAD4;
text-align:center;
padding:2px 5px;
}

.my_table tr:nth-child(even){
background:#E6EDF5;
}

.my_table tr:nth-child(odd){
background:#F0F5FA;
}

Solution 1

IE8 doesn't support the nth-child selector I'm afraid:

http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/pseudoclass-nthchild

Solution 2

As a good workaround, jQuery has added this to their project and achieving this using JavaScript is acceptable:

For my CSS, I would have

.my_table tr.even{
    background:#E6EDF5;
}

.my_table tr.odd{
    background:#F0F5FA;
}

And I would use jQuery to do this:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $(".my_table tr:nth-child(even)").addClass("even");
    $(".my_table tr:nth-child(odd)").addClass("odd");
});

Solution 3

You can use first-child and "+" to emulate nth-child, example:

tr > td:first-child + td + td + td + td + td + td + td + td {
    background-color: red;
}

That select the 9th column, just like nth-child(9), and that works on IE

Solution 4

I made some time ago, a prude simple javascript solution for this problem:

https://gist.github.com/yckart/5652296

var nthChild = function (elem, num) {
    var len = elem.length;
    var ret = [];
    var i = 0;

    // :nth-child(num)
    if (!isNaN(Number(num))) {
        for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
            if (i === num - 1) return elem[i];
        }
    }

    // :nth-child(numn+num)
    if (num.indexOf('+') > 0) {
        var parts = num.match(/\w/g);
        for (i = parts[2] - 1; i < len; i += parts[0] << 0) {
            if (elem[i]) ret.push(elem[i]);
        }
    }

    // :nth-child(odd)
    if (num === 'odd') {
        for (i = 0; i < len; i += 2) {
            ret.push(elem[i]);
        }
    }

    // :nth-child(even)
    if (num === 'even') {
        for (i = 1; i < len; i += 2) {
            ret.push(elem[i]);
        }
    }

    return ret;
};

The usage is quite simple and similar to the css-selector:

var rows = document.querySelectorAll('li');
var num = nthChild(rows, 2);
var formula = nthChild(rows, '3n+1');
var even = nthChild(rows, 'even');
var odd = nthChild(rows, 'odd');


// Note, forEach needs to be polyfilled for oldIE
even.forEach(function (li) {
    li.className += ' even';
});

odd.forEach(function (li) {
    li.className += 'odd';
});

formula.forEach(function (li) {
    li.className += ' formula';
});

num.style.backgroundColor = 'black';

http://jsfiddle.net/ARTsinn/s3KLz/

Solution 5

This is the Dojo version, it works fine:

  dojo.addOnLoad(function(){
      dojo.query("table tr:nth-child(odd)").addClass("odd");
      dojo.query("table tr:nth-child(even)").addClass("even");
  });

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