Seemingly-simple valid HTML renders diff in FF1.0, IE6

[Pete]

Hello everybody --

The problem has me stopped. The page:

http://www.key-horse.com/fftst.html

is rendered completely differently by Firefox 1.0 and IE 6.0. The code
seems to me perfectly straightforward and simpl: show two small tables
side-by-side and top-aligned when the browser window is wide enough,
else show the tables arranged vertically.

My HTML must be wrong: I've made IE6.0 do as I expect, whereas I've
made FF1.0 do something surprising, meaning:

1. Tables look to be one row deep in FF; and
2. Tables seem to be bottom-aligned in FF.
What is the proper HTML to do this job? Thanks!

-- Pete

[Jukka K. Korpela]

"Pete" <pe*****@yahoo.com> wrote:

http://www.key-horse.com/fftst.html

is rendered completely differently by Firefox 1.0 and IE 6.0.
To begin with, "seemingly-valid" (as on your Subject line) is a pointless
concept. Is you think that validity is important, simply check it (but
don't pollute your pages with foolish icons for such purposes).
The code
seems to me perfectly straightforward and simpl: show two small tables
side-by-side and top-aligned when the browser window is wide enough,
else show the tables arranged vertically.
But you are using CSS for that, not HTML. Hence this would belong to
c.i.w.a.stylesheets.

You seem to have set display: inline for your tables. If this is taken
seriously, it means that your table becomes just inline text, like the
content of a paragraph. You would probably want to use float: left instead.
Or maybe positioning. But this belongs to the other group.

Your HTML has some oddities though;
<p><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></p>
is a coarse way of trying to create some empty vertical space, and should
more or less be ignored by browsers. It's much better to use CSS (margin
properties) for such purposes.
What is the proper HTML to do this job?

Well, you _could_ float tables in HTML too, using <table align="left"> and
putting <br clear="both"> after the tables.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html