Why is IE screwing up table width?

[Ardesco]

Actually, usually find IE makes more sense than FF. To centre tables on screen in FF I had to put a div round everything and use

<style type="text/css">
body {text-align:center;}
div {width:100%; text-align:-moz-center;}

text-align:-moz-center; ????? WTF????

Also jscript has much more useful constructs in IE, even for things that are not security issues.

Anyway, this is mostly finished site. If you think it looks TULIPS you should have seen it before!

http://www.gatekeeperel.co.uk/


PS Oh bum! Haven't tested it in IE6!

The reviews page is left aligned instead of centre aligned like the rest.

[xoggoth]

Ta to those pointing our review alignment prob in FF. Extra DIV in the style!

[PAH]

"Mainstream" good, standards bad?

Please God let me not say things like that, I'd be ashamed of myself.

Problem is the 'mainstream' often dictates the standard. Just look at the HD format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Sony's product may not necessarily be any better, but because they bunged it in the PS3, whilst MS decided to supply the HD-DVD as an optional add-on, Blu-Ray appear to be in the final stages of winning that battle and making Blu-Ray the standard.

If 99% of the population are using IE (which I know they aren't nowadays), unless I have a boss that tells me to, I'm not going to lose sleep over the 1% who choose to use a different browser, because IE is in effect the standard that the population have 'chosen'.

[xoggoth]

Agree with last. FF users must be an awful lot more than 1% though.

[PAH]

Agree with last. FF users must be an awful lot more than 1% though.

Yeah FF is the new contender to IE's crown, since AOL screwed up Nutscrape. Around 20% of market in some regions according to a quick google. Awful lot of geeks out there!

I'm keeping my eye on the day when FF may still overthrow IE as the number 1, especially if the EU ever manage to force M$ to not ship it as standard with their OS.

Should be a good day for contractors if FF ever does get on similar terms to IE. Plenty of work revamping websites to work in both browsers. So my logic on largely ignoring FF for the moment may not be as dumb as some think.

[NickFitz]

Should be a good day for contractors if FF ever does get on similar terms to IE. Plenty of work revamping websites to work in both browsers. So my logic on largely ignoring FF for the moment may not be as dumb as some think.

Hmm..

"Who shall we get to fix our website so it works on Firefox?"

"What about that useless twonk who was too lazy or incompetent to make it work cross-browser in the first place?"

Firefox already has sufficient market share that any public-facing web site or application must work with it. Even if it only had 20% (and current stats vary between 16% and 36%) you are effectively denying your clients the opportunity of getting business from one in five of their prospective customers by producing IE-only code.

There's a reason why outfits such as the BBC and Yahoo! mandate support, at an absolute minimum, for IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 and up, Opera 9, and Safari. Note that they also insist on the correct use of CSS to separate content from presentation, and the use of unobtrusive JavaScript for enhancing behaviour, rather than JavaScript support being a requirement.

They both have plenty of legacy code which doesn't yet meet these high standards but I can assure you that, if you tried to suggest using a table to control layout on any new code for Yahoo!, or sought to argue that because a page looked OK in IE it wasn't worth worrying about the other browsers, you'd be thrown out of the door (and probably beaten over the head with the coding standards mallet, too).

Table-based layouts and code that only works in IE are dead in the water. It's time to catch up to where everybody else has been heading for the past seven years. The environment is reasonably stable (new versions of IE being the major problem at the moment) and all the serious problems have been solved. There's no longer any excuse.

[NickFitz]

BTW, Xog:

http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center
http://bluerobot.com/web/css/center1.html

HTH

[expat]

Problem is the 'mainstream' often dictates the standard. Just look at the HD format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Sony's product may not necessarily be any better, but because they bunged it in the PS3, whilst MS decided to supply the HD-DVD as an optional add-on, Blu-Ray appear to be in the final stages of winning that battle and making Blu-Ray the standard.

Surely it is not the same: this is 2 competing types, neither of which is a real standard. By contrast, for web pages there is a standard, and one browser breaks it left right and centre (so to speak).

If 99% of the population are using IE (which I know they aren't nowadays), unless I have a boss that tells me to, I'm not going to lose sleep over the 1% who choose to use a different browser, because IE is in effect the standard that the population have 'chosen'.

Um, same point, majority percentage is not a "standard", ISO Standard is a standard. "The population" do not choose an HTML Standard by majority vote FFS.

OK, I'm only pretending not to understand. Actually you don't give a **** for the standard. Why not just say so, instead of trying to dress up your carelessness in democratically legitimising clothes?

[PAH]

Table-based layouts and code that only works in IE are dead in the water.

What is the acceptable standard compliant way to present the traditional 3 column layout (as originally inspired by newsprint formats) without using a table?

[chicane]

What is the acceptable standard compliant way to present the traditional 3 column layout (as originally inspired by newsprint formats) without using a table?

Take your pick:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...e+Search&meta=