IE pushing table down the page

[PeterBailey2]

Hello, I'm having trouble with ie and tables staying where they're supposed to be. Here's the link to an example. What i have is a table in a div, the div having orange as a background and each td having white background. For some reason ie is pushing the table half way down the screen exposing the orange. I know ie has bugs, but i'm not sure what they are or how to get around them. I've tried position:absolute; top:200px, but that made the border go 'funny'.

Thanks, Peter

[karinne]

I don't get it .... what it is suppose to look like?! IE6 and FF display the same for me so ...

[PeterBailey2]

I've made a temporary fix which only aligns the footer bar correctly on ie.

Regenerated: http://www.publicwarehouse.co.uk/test123/file.php

[PeterBailey2]

It was to do with min-height. now using:

min-height:690px
height:auto;
height:690px;

I read somewhere that ie uses height as min-height.

Thanks for the err.. help

[Ryan Fait]

You need the !important declaration on the auto, don't you?

[PeterBailey2]

Yeh i noticed that and fixed it, still didn't work though. In the end i used tables, ie and safari can do tables. I'll happily kill anyone who says i should use css for structure.

[Ryan Fait]

You should use CSS for the structure. (Un)ordered lists would be the appropriate way to go...

[PeterBailey2]

instead of tables?

[karinne]

Never use tables for layout! There ... you have to kill 2 people now

See the link in my sig ... it's also a sticky in a few of the forums. Read the articles ... you'll understand why you shouldn't be using tables.

There's also quite a few site with examples of CSS layouts that you can use.

[Ryan Fait]

Those links are more like lists than tabular data in my opinion...

[PeterBailey2]

The problem with using tables:

• mixes presentational data in with your content.
  • This makes the file sizes of your pages unnecessarily large, as users must download this presentational data for each page they visit.
  • Bandwidth ain't free.
• This makes redesigns of existing sites and content extremely labor intensive (and expensive).
• It also makes it extremely hard (and expensive) to maintain visual consistency throughout a site.
• Table-based pages are also much less accessible to users with disabilities and viewers using cell phones and PDAs to access the Web.

My table is about 5 lines - big difference.

I use SSI for the header and footer. That's 2 files for the 'entire' site, so no, not labour intensive to change

as i said, ie and safari both have bugs to do with ccs. They don't have bugs to do with tables, min height is done automatically.

Please give me a real reason not to use tables, and maybe tell me how long it takes for my site to load

[karinne]

Ugh! Why is it that we always have to push people into using the proper elements for the job?!

From the horses' mouth 11.1 Introduction to tables

The HTML table model allows authors to arrange data

Like Ryan said previously ... those links should be displayed using an unordered list.

So ... if you want your code to be semantic (to have meaning), then use a list.

[Ryan Fait]

Accessibility, ease of updating the style, SEO. By updating the site, includes don't do much for that. With a style sheet, you can change the color of the text on your site, rearrange the order of the content, etc.

Trust us... as professionals, the reasons for us spending extra time making sites with CSS are obviously good enough. And Safari has very few bugs; it's almost exactly the same as FF, but a little bit better.

[PeterBailey2]

Well i read it has trouble with min-hight. It's also not displaying my link colours correctly. All my colours and sizes are in my style sheet. The table just groups them, If i wanted to i could change it back to use divs just as easily.

As for rearranging content, I'm not sure i'll want the footer, header, sidebar or content blocks anywhere else anyway. Although i can change them if i wanted to.

[Ryan Fait]

Ah, just looked into in. Safari 2 supports min-height just fine, but Safari 1 apparently didn't. As Safari 2 comes standard with OS X, everyone who has upgraded from OS X 10.2 will be fine (And we're on 10.4 now, so that's most people). If you've got problems with colors and fonts displaying correctly, then it's a matter of shoddy CSS. Don't use <div>'s, use lists!