Another Netscape post

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Reading Andrew_Samuel's post reminded me to check my in-production site in Netscape, and I was also shocked. In particular, the tables that set up the whole look of the site. It looks fine in IE5+ and NS6, but becomes a disaster in NS4. I don't want to reinvent the wheel for NS4 but can anybody please look at my site and tell me if something jumps out at them as an obvious problem pertaining to the tables.

pstvalumni.com/index_real.shtml

Please note that only this page and the first menu "Directoy" work properly. You'll see that the tables are messed up in general, but in particular, the top and bottom "caps" are missing completely (each are "col span=3"). And as for the menu, I'm not concerned with the incorrect link color because I know this is a CSS problem with NS4, but what is going on with the menu box background? I don't even have a background image in that area... it seems to be coming thru from underneath.

THANKS!

The Webmistress's picture

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1st question is why do you have the top image as a background image for the table & not just an image in the table? Change that over and it will be viewable in NS. The side menu could be that you haven't actually got a table width entered, just the cell size. Also where you have cells with nothing in them NS will generally ignore these hence the reason you aren't getting the right and bottom black lines shoing. Adding nbsp; to those columns should sort this out.

Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....

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Thanks for the advice. I'll try them out later tonight after work.

Smiling

The Webmistress's picture

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Let us know how you get on.

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Quote: Originally posted by The Webmistress
Let us know how you get on.

Hmm. Not quite what I expected.

First of all, I don't have Netscape at home so I'll need to wait until I get back to work tomorrow to check it (unless one of you wants to tell me what it looks like). But when I made the suggested changes, now I've got spaces between my tables on IE. I've fiddled around but I'm basically stumped as to why moving the top and bottom cap graphics from the background to the foreground is causing this problem. This works for one of my other sites without problems. ANd my height and width tags are correct.

I temporarily added a thin border to the table for y'all to see there the table elements fall. The spaces are horizontal only, falling below my top cap graphic, and both above and below the bottom cap graphic. Any help? Thanks again.

The Webmistress's picture

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You are getting the spaces because in your code you have got a space between the image and the , get rid of the space in the code and that'll get rid of the space below the image.

As for NS it looks awful. You still have't put a table width for the left navigation if you tell that table to be 98px wide then you'll see it fine. And for the right hand side try putting a black gif into that last column 1x1px which should sort that out.

Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....

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Dealing only with IE for now, I'm convinced that the horizontal spaces have nothing to do with my table, but are coming from somewhere else (not that I can't be wrong).

Here's the page link again:
pstvalumni.com/index_real.shtml
I duplicated the code and put it at the bottom to fiddle with. I simplified as much as I could and completely took off the bottom cap and I am just trying to get rid of that space that is now colored green.

But I took this same simplified code from the bottom and put it on a new page with no header or footer or CSS or anything else other than the table... and it works fine. Check this like out:
pstvalumni.com/tableproblem.shtml

Since the table itself is the same, what could be causeing this problem?

The Webmistress's picture

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I took your code, removed the space between the image and the and it gets rid of the space.

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Quote: Originally posted by The Webmistress
I took your code, removed the space between the image and the and it gets rid of the space.

Hi, and thank you very much for your help (and patience).

I saw you wrote that a few posts ago but I don't see any space between the image and the . I had a "return key" in there putting the on a separate row and thought that since there was no space, it was not the problem. I took the "return key" out (bringing it up a line) and it worked just like you said. THANKS!

But you DID see a space. Could it be the that I couldn't see it because I write all my code in Notepad? (I still don't see any space.) Is Notepad my problem?

Suzanne's picture

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A "space" is not necessarily a space character. Any character (hidden or visible) between the end of the image tag and the closing td tag will cause a space.

The Webmistress's picture

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Guess it was just experience of having that problem occur for myself and even though I use DW I have learned to go through manually and change things like that in the code.

Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....

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Okay, thanks to everyone's help, I fixed the problem with the IE spacing. ANd my top and bottom cap graphics now show up in NS4. But if you take a look at http://www.pstvalumni.com/index_real.shtml in NS4 again, there's something new going on.

(Ignore the menu background problem. I'll either fix it soon or give up and make my menu a graphic with an image map) The problem is that repeating right side. This shouldn't happen because all table data have defined widths. The overall table says width=710 and the td for the middle section of the second row is set to width=600 (left side is 100 and right side is 10), but the width comes up short for some reason.

Any ideas?

Suzanne's picture

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If you don't have any content (spacer.gif or spaces), then it will collapse. Period.

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Sorry I'm keeping this thread going so long, but I've got another table that's not lining up and I don't see ANY space or character or return in the code so I can't figure it out. (Everything I'm about to mention is regarding IE5+ only)

If you go to most pages on my site, I have a constant table width of 710. There are 3 columns and three rows. The first and last row are solid "cap" graphics of 710px that span all three columns. The middle row has a left (w/ menu), middle (content goes there), and right (just a border). Everything is fine. Yeah!

PSTValumni.com

But I've got a few pages that NEED to expand past my desired 710 width. For these pages I made a different version of the header and footer files to create the same 3 by 3 table, but with the middle column expandable (variable width). If you look at the link below, you'll see that this variable width table seems to work perfectly on the top and middle rows, but something goes wrong on along the bottom row only. I don't see any spaces or such in the code except for the bottom row, middle colmnn which is variable width so I apparently need to put a space in there to make the repeating background show up. So what's causing this?

http://www.pstvalumni.com/dir80a.shtml

Please help (again).

P.S. Incase anybody asks me if I validated my code, the answer is I tried and it hated everything about my code, EXCEPT for the part I'm asking about.

Confused

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