php-generated tables rendering with gaps in IE. Why??

Lilabit

Hi everyone. I'm new, and I apologize thoroughly if this is answered somewhere else, but I kind of don't even know what to search for to find the answer to this, but I tried anyway, and still no dice.

So here's my website, http://www.lilana.com. If you're using IE for Windows (I assume this is happening in 5 or 6) you will notice that the scrollwork at the top and bottom does not line up with itself, as if the main content has pushed the header part up and the footer part down, so that it does not match the scrollwork at the top and bottom of the navs. I made a table with one 3-row cell and then three cells to the right; the navs and header/main/footer respectively. The navs were their own php include, the header, content, and footer were also each their own includes. Yet still the misalignment.

To fix this, I redid the php (viewable at http://www.lilana.com/test) to reflect a more horizontal table data arrangement rather than the previous vertical one. Now the table is three rows of 2 columns (top of navs, header; middle of navs, content; bottom of navs, footer), and the php requires split it up like this: top of navs/header/middle of navs; content; and bottom of navs, footer. Within these three requires, the html tables all fit together into the 6-celled thing they should be. But now the images don't line up horizontally, though it fixed the earlier problem. Basically, it seems as if when I divide up the table cells into different php requires, IE does not like to space everything nicely anymore, even though all borders and cellspacing/padding are 0.

Is this just because I'm trying to design in a fashion IE can't handle? It looks great (both versions) in ALL THE OTHER BROWSERS. Is there a workaround for this, to force the php-generated html table to display the way a regular one would? Should I just suck it up and do it in flash instead? Help!

Drakla

IE is a complete baby sometimes - try this, take out all the newlines and spaces between your tags and have the closing </td> also at the end of the same line - you'll probably end up with a line about 3k in length, but it quite often solves this horror.

Roger_Ramjet

Yes, IE assumes a line break of some sort even where not intended and adds 1 or 2 pixels which can make your layout look horrible. There are some tools and sites around that you can use to strip out all whitespace from your code for production version, allowing you to still write well structured code while developing it. I wonder if that is something they have 'fixed' in IE 7 when it does come out.

pedlar

If at all possible, I suggest using css for layout instead of tables. for most things, ie respects css fairly well, and if you use a strict doctype declaration you can have it render quite normally across most browsers.

Lilabit

pedlar wrote:
If at all possible, I suggest using css for layout instead of tables. for most things, ie respects css fairly well, and if you use a strict doctype declaration you can have it render quite normally across most browsers.

Do you mean using absolutely positioned divs for layout instead of tables? But would the fact that I'd be opening a div tag in one php require and closing it in the next one still confuse it?

I can't get over that whitespace, of all things, would be the culprit. I'll try taking that out first before I redo it all in css. But thanks!

dalecosp

Lilabit wrote:
Do you mean using absolutely positioned divs for layout instead of tables? But would the fact that I'd be opening a div tag in one php require and closing it in the next one still confuse it?

It shouldn't ... the browser will only see one file regardless of how many PHP files it takes to output the (X)HTML code.

Welcome to PHPBuilder, BTW....

Lilabit

Thanks everyone! CSS positioning worked!