Help with table positioning

[Roamer]

Can someone please help with table positioning on this page
http://rmhh.co.uk/occup/Test3.html

It parses fine for me and nearly all my users, but some, using IE6 and NS7.1
report row misalignment and overlapping on header and footer. It's driving me
nuts, but I want to migrate from tables to all CSS to reduce filesize.

The relevant Style follows:-

#columnleft {
float: left;
width: 240px;
}

#columnright {
position: absolute: left;
}

#header {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 790px;
color: #808000;
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
font-size: smaller;
}

#columnleft {
position: relative;
left: 16px;
}
#footer {
position: relative;
left: 14px;
}
..head {
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
font-size: larger;
font-style: normal;
color: #808000;
text-decoration: underline;
}

[Mark Tranchant]

Roamer wrote:

Can someone please help with table positioning on this page
http://rmhh.co.uk/occup/Test3.html

It parses fine for me and nearly all my users, but some, using IE6 and NS7.1
report row misalignment and overlapping on header and footer. It's driving me
nuts, but I want to migrate from tables to all CSS to reduce filesize.

This is tabular data. A table is the correct element to use for this. A
properly marked-up table would probably take less space and be easier to
style - see http://billericaychoral.org.uk/past for an example.

Are you trying to reduce file size as stored on disk, or bandwidth? If
the latter, and you have any control over your server, you could try
setting it up to gzip the output, which is not currently done. This
would reduce the transmitted size of the file you supply to just 35% of
original.

Of course, getting rid of that irritating and quite low quality 40KB
animated flag would help!

--
Mark.

[Phil Evans]

Roamer wrote:

Can someone please help with table positioning on this page
http://rmhh.co.uk/occup/Test3.html

It parses fine for me and nearly all my users,

The W3C checker disagrees

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...p%2FTest3.html

HTML 4.01 Strict is probably a better doctype to aim for as well, unless
you really need anything from Transitional.

I'd take a closer look at how you're marking this up, too. At the
moment, the word and its definition aren't logically linked to one
another, which is why you're getting alignment problems - there's no way
for the browser to know that a definition should be kept alongside a
particular word. Maybe a definition list would be more appropriate here?
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_dl.asp

P

[Roamer]

Thanks to Mark & Phil for your replies.
I'll work on it and gzip the output of
all my other pages, This one was a test
to see if I could better the download
time for the many dial-ups who use my
Genealogy site.

Your advice much appreciated

R