ordered list (and IE)

My list ordering appears fine in chrome and FF, but not in IE (all appear as 1's). I'm not even sure where to begin regarding what's going on. I spent a little time on a google search, but I'm still not sure where to begin (my keyword combinations didn't bring me what I'm looking for, but a question about formatting problems in IE did bring me to this site, so I thought I'd try; I like the related questions window above the text box).

If any thoughtful readers have tips, tricks, links, suggestions, solutions, I'm 开发者_Go百科interested in why it happens and how to fix it.

Here's the link: http://www.technion.ac.il/~balazs/htms/tops1.3.htm

We're a small enough community to tell folks to look at it in FF or Chrome, BUT I'd rather learn how to do it right . . .

Thank you in advance for any feedback!

Whenever a page doesn't render as I expect, the first thing that I do is run it through the w3c markup validation service.

The following page highlights a number of errors with your HTML:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.technion.ac.il%2F%7Ebalazs%2Fhtms%2Ftops1.3.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Fix those up and all should be rosy!

You need to use the li element for lists. Any other tags are not allowed and will not validate. You seems to be using some sort of WYSISYG program or CMS that's wrapping each li in a span that gives them a black font color and a slightly larger size.

<ol>
<span style="font-size: larger; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><li>Login and open the program</li></span>
    <ol type="a">
    <li>Sign the logbook (name and phone number)</li>
    ...

The reason why in Firefox and Chrome it works is because they're slightly more forgiving.

And will you now excuse me while I rinse the residue image of Comic Sans from my eyes?