Posted by Andy Dingley on 03/12/07 10:36

On 11 Mar, 05:23, "kfogle" <kristy.fo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I cannot figure out why IE is interpreting my code so differently than
> FF. In FF, my tables are great!

Your markup looks like it's 10 years old and that style makes it hard
to keep it remotely consistent between browsers. So fix the coding
style issue first, then worry about the presentation details.

Your application is appropriate for a <table>, so your overall code
structure around the inner tables isn't bad. The outer table is a
superfluous layout-only table though, and they're a bad idea. That
should go and be replaced with a simpler <div> and some CSS (possibly
two nested <div>s) to control margins and presentation.

You're also controlling presentation with thousands of attributes on
each table cell (HTML 3.2 style). Remove all the attributes from the
table elements. Replace them with just a few class attributes, and
then attach all the presentation stuff via CSS.

The purists would kill all the tables here, but that's more than is
essential.


This isn't a quick fix, I admit. Possibly there is such a fix -- often
there's one subtle interaction between table attributes that breaks
things in just this manner. However I have no interest in such things
and I certainly don't try to fix them without getting paid! They're
awkward things to track down and rectify because they're simply not
"rational" or obvious. This is why the non-table, presentation-free
approach to HTML wins out -- it's simpler and certainly more
straightforward overall, even if there's some re-learning to do from
the beginning.


(Any tutorial you read in the last 6 years that taught you to code
like this should be thrown away).

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