Tables, alternatives and Mozilla quirks

[Jonivar Skullerud]

I am trying to create a set of pages with a standard layout with
banner and horizontal navigation bar at the top of the page. Ideally
i would do this without use of tables, but it seems i will be forced
to resort to tables to appease IE users (at least 95% of the readers
of these pages will be using Mozilla, but among the IE users there may
be some important people...)

An example of what i am trying to do is at

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~jonivar/test/links.html

Here i have rendered both the banner and the navbar in two ways, with
and without use of html tables. Unfortunately i know in advance that
the non-table versions will not work in IE. I have tested this in
Mozilla and Opera, but so far not in IE.

1. I can probably hack the banner to get the text centered correctly
in IE as well without, but the appropriate way of doing it is not
clear to me, so hints will be appreciated. But the real problem is
how to do the navigation bar without html tables and still get it
to work in IE.

2. With css tables the hover effect in the navbar works the way i
would want it to; with the table markup you risk the <a> box being
smaller than the cell. Is there a way to ensure that the link
always fills up the entire cell while keeping the desired padding?

3. Depending on which way the various divs are ordered, in Mozilla the
navbar may fill up the entire width of the viewport, and even
create a box extending beyond the border of the body. This happens
if the table version of the banner comes after the float version.
If the html-table navbar is not enclosed in a div it is affected by
this quirk. This does not happen in Opera, which behaves as
expected. Is this a bug (feature?) in Mozilla, or have i done
something stupidly wrong?

4. Finally, Opera insists on the body being just a bit bigger than the
viewport. Can this be easily fixed?

--
| jonivar skullerud | http://www.jonivar.skullerud.name/ |
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