Website Coding Trouble [Archive]

Cyberoonie

01-09-2007, 11:02 AM

Ive been recoding my gaming website over the past few days to attempt to get the tables to fit the content (as seen in my previous thread a few months back).

Now, ive managed to get it all working (well almost) with a few problems.

Firstly, if using Firefox and loading the webpage (the one in my profile) it all appears fine apart from I am having trouble with the side bar. Basically I want all the side blocks to shrink to fit the amount of text there is (it is done using PHP and MySQL). For example, at the moment there are 2 servers shown, the text box however has enough room for at least 10. Im looking to get it to shrink to only fit the 2 displayed.

The end result should be something like having the side bar with Servers, Next Matches, Latest Results, Online now displayed neatly at the top of the page and then the grey bar at the bottom extending down to match the content in the middle. I hope that makes sense. In other words, I want the side blocks to be as compact as possible with the grey underneath to expand with the main content.

Id be happy if that was my only problem, but ive got a bigger one too. Its pretty obvious from when you load the page in IE. The side bar is all over the place with gaps everywhere.

Any help at all would be appreciated. The code can be found from the view source.

Cheers,

Jay

drhowarddrfine

01-09-2007, 12:17 PM

You can never get IE to pretend it's a modern browser without a proper doctype. Without one, IE goes into quirks mode and all heck breaks loose. New pages should always use a strict doctype but older code than uses deprecated elements needs to use a transitional one.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Unfortunately, using a strict doctype may scramble your page because, essentially, you'd be changing the display 'rules' when you add it. But try strict and see what happens. Then try transitional if strict scrambles things up.

Use Firefox as your base because IE is old, buggy and non-standard (also true of IE7), but we can hack the code to make it work in IE.

EDIT: The gray area goes to the bottom now. You are also using tables for layout (which you should never do) and I've never done that before and have a hard time debugging such things. You'll have to explain a little better how you are doing it now or, perhaps, a little more detail on what you want. I may be missing something.