[WEB4LIB] Help, please! IE oddity

[Araby Greene]

Sometimes, when you drag table borders around a lot in FP, the table cell
sizes eventually do not add up. Highlight the 4 cells that are giving you
problems and uncheck specifiy size and specify height. The cells should
"sprong" into place. Then drag the center cell border to match the other
tables, to force a pixel width, rather than the default 50%. Widths of 277
and 343 look about right, if you want to edit the code. The left cells in
the concatenated table contain <p align="left"> tags, so they aren't
centered, even though <td align="center"> is present.

When the cell dimensions don't compute, NS and IE usually handle the
discrepancies differently. IE will sometimes squish the contents to the
specified cell size and render the borders to fit the overall dimensions. An
errant height tag will also cause a lot of problems.

<grr>Are you not allowed to download and install the browser of your choice?
If not, I'd scream to the director. If you're developing web pages, you need
to have several browsers available for testing.</grr>

Hope this helps.

-araby

____________________________________________
Araby Greene
Web Development Librarian
Getchell Library | http://www.library.unr.edu/
784-6500 ext. 343 | araby at unr.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julia Schult" <jschult at elmira.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 5:59 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Help, please! IE oddity


I just discovered that some of the tables on my government documents pages
look very strange in Internet Explorer.  Specifically, while the text is
centered with respect to itself, it is all squished over to the left side of
the cell.  I use FrontPage, and my first thought was "what has FP done to it
now?" but I've looked at the html and it looks fine.  The tables look fine
in FP, and they look fine in Netscape.  Here's two pages where the effect is
noticeable:

http://www.elmira.edu/library/govdocs/guides.html#topics
(there are two tables here: top table has the problem, bottom table doesn't)

http://www.elmira.edu/library/govdocs/govdocs.html

I seem to be using IE 5.0 (I thought I had 5.5 but it looks like the IT
dept. installed 5.0 instead when I got my new computer this fall -- grr.)


---Julia E. Schult
Access/Electronic Services Librarian
Elmira College
Jschult at elmira.edu