problems migrating to better use of CSS

to my knowledge cellspacing particularly cannot be set trough css, for cellpadding margins do a similar effect

Um, use and for and unless they are for specific types as they are semantic markup and will not be deprecated.

If you're doing data markup, try looking up CSS for tables, it's quite large and a lot of it is supported.

what about ? i figured that and would get deprecated soon since they seem to be the same as / and respectively

well instead of guessing, I'd recommend you hop on over to w3.org and find out for real instead.

http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_09.html#a000203 has a number of good links on how to use tables for tabular data to better effect using standards and CSS.

iddn't find anything specifically on div and classes.
i know that w3cschools notes that align is deprecated.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22class%22+%22div%22+%22html%22

is the search i didn but can't find anything on why using a div with a CSS class that had "text-align:center;" was completely overlooked.

i haven't tried a diff class that didn't include that because the thing that's most crucial IS the alignment.

Where didn't you find anything specifically on div and classes?!

Don't mix DIV and TABLE -- that's just asking for trouble.

Edited to add: I mean for positioning. Clearly you'll have to use DIV and TABLE together for data sites and DIVs can be useful in TABLE layouts as well.

Quote: By m3rajk: "I don't have extensive CSS experience."

Perhaps THIS REFERENCE SHEET would be of some help.

I noticed you said {padding:0} didn't work in your CSS. On the above-mentioned reference sheet, the only shortcut I'm seeing is something like

{
padding: 5px 15px 5px 15px;
}.

Perhaps just {padding:0} will not work(?), but there seems to be many shortcuts depending on who is writing these tutorial-type things.

Anyway, the longer CSS version (not the short cut shown above), according to this reference sheet, would be something like the following:

{
padding-top: 5px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-left: 15px;
}

Hope that (and the reference sheet) will be of some help, and good luck.
I know nothing about the PHP part, though.

thanx feisty. it turned out that it was calling it in table and not td.

thanx a lot for that ref sheet. i'v been using the one at w3c schools, but i like that one better, has things not mentioned in the w3cschools one (i just added yours to my bookmarks)

suzanne-

w3cschools just says it's deprecated, not that it's only deprecated for certain tags. i took that to mean that it's deprecated in ALL tags.

but that still doesn't explain why when i had a class that changed the font-face, font-color and should have set a text align of center, the class only did the first two. the text-align was ignored

1. no, an attribute that's deprecated for A tag is not necessarily deprecated for ALL tags. HOWEVER, in this case, yes, for XHTML + it's deprecated for DIV and TABLE tags (and possibly TD, but I don't use it so I've never bothered to figure that out).

2. Depends on the browser, you may have hit a glitch, but not having centered aligned TEXT is not what you were talking about! You were talking about the container being aligned center, and for that, it's margin: 0 auto 0 auto; where 0 is however much you want on the top and then on the bottom.

Provide a working page and you'll get a proper answer, and please, be as clear as possible about your questions. Posting a pile of code isn't helpful, since people then have to make their own pages to test it. Make a test page!

Or check out the VERY GOOD DEVELOPER RESOURCES I posted in earlier responses. If you're getting stuck on something too basic to be listed, the only way we'll find it is with sample broken code.

actually the inital question wasn't realated to centering. lol.

and yes, i see where stating i was using it for a div the first time was a little less than well phrased (ok, a lot less)

my browser is mozilla 1.3.1

well that's the one i'm doing the primary testing in. unfortunately ie has reclaimed default on me again i hate M$ and it's insistence that it has to be all the defaults. i figure with the ie end of life announcement, i shouldn't bother using that as the primary browser to test. i'm actually going back after i have it working like i want in mozilla and making sure it's ok in ie

i've noticed that while the class is ignored in div on mozilla, it's utelyzed by ie

url

used to have it on the test page mentioned for css. i think it's still set up like that. just edited it to include a table
http://24.91.157.113/findyourdesire/zhtmlsetup.html