Table Explodes - sometimes - in Safari

[Adam]

Hi all,

OK, I'm baffled. I have a menu in a table which I've just realized is
"breaking apart" in Safari:

http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/index.html

Yet when I plunk the menu by itself into its own "test" page, it holds
together fine:

http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/menutest.html

What gives? I've put spacers in every cell, which has always worked
before... and it looks fine in IE and Netscape. Only recently noticed
the Safari problem.

Only diff I can see is that in the real page the menu table is within
a cell of a larger table, whereas in the test page it's on its own.

Is Safari more strict about HTML rendering, or just buggy? I can't
tell...

Thanks!
Adam

[Barry Pearson]

Adam wrote:

Hi all,
OK, I'm baffled. I have a menu in a table which I've just realized is
"breaking apart" in Safari:
http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/index.html

Yet when I plunk the menu by itself into its own "test" page, it holds
together fine:
http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/menutest.html

What gives? I've put spacers in every cell, which has always worked
before... and it looks fine in IE and Netscape. Only recently noticed
the Safari problem.

Only diff I can see is that in the real page the menu table is within
a cell of a larger table, whereas in the test page it's on its own.

Is Safari more strict about HTML rendering, or just buggy? I can't
tell...

It isn't just Safari. It blows apart with Firefox 0.8 & Netscape 7.1 on W2000,
too. It blows apart even more when fonts sizes are increased. I think what
happens is that the main cell is having unwanted influence over the menu cell.
But I don't even understand some of the tags I see there, so I don't know how
they *should* behave!

Did that HTML come out of a graphics package or a "layout-mode"? (Perhaps
Photoshop/ImageReady CS? GoLive?) It looks like the sort of over-controlled
HTML that gives layout tables a bad name. Such packages appear to be obsessed
with putting height controls on tables & cells, presumably to try to force the
rendering to match what the author saw on the screen when developing it.

I'm not sure how to get to where you want to be from where you are. But I
doubt if you will achieve a layout that works cross-browser under a variety of
user viewing conditions while you have many, or even any, width & height
attributes in the table elements. (They are OK in image elements). If you want
tight control of dimensions, even as far as pixel-perfect layouts, you have to
use CSS, because tables cannot be controlled to the same degree by authors.
You would either have to use a tableless layout, or use very simple layout
tables controlled by CSS.

I suspect you have been led astray by the authoring tools, and you may have to
learn more about HTML to get back on track.

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

[Spartanicus]

ad********@shaw.ca (Adam) wrote:

OK, I'm baffled. I have a menu in a table which I've just realized is
"breaking apart" in Safari:

http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/index.html

First correct the errors, then report back:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...tro/index.html

--
Spartanicus

[Daniel R. Tobias]

ad********@shaw.ca (Adam) wrote in message news:<84**************************@posting.google. com>...

OK, I'm baffled. I have a menu in a table which I've just realized is
"breaking apart" in Safari:

http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/index.html

Since "index.html" is the default index name for your server, you can
state this URI in a shorter, more elegant form, as:

http://www.fitcityforwomen.com/00-intro/

You should use ALT attributes for all of your images, including empty
ALT="" for spacers, so that text-mode browsers get meaningful content
for the images requiring it (e.g., ones with text content, like
buttons) and can skip ones that don't need any content (e.g.,
spacers). (Try your page in Lynx some time.)

Some pretty weird tags in there... just what is "csaction" supposed to
mean?

--
Dan

[Neal]

On 20 Apr 2004 10:46:49 -0700, Daniel R. Tobias <da*@tobias.name> wrote:

Some pretty weird tags in there... just what is "csaction" supposed to
mean?

See http://www.nic.fi/~tapio1/HTMLKit/Attributes2a.php3

"CSACTIONS etc. are all created by Adobe's GoLive editors...."