IE7&6? & Firefox problem in website layout

[ronmars]

Alright, so I'm designing a layout for a project I coded in PHP, to give it a different touch and look. I am making a lot of drastic changes within the code of the website, but right now I'm working on the design, until I came across something I didn't recognized or overlooked since I mainly use Firefox. When I looked in IE7 the page had no structure.

I'm using a combination of CSS and tables.

See the page:

http://www.ronaldarichardson.com/socialnet/dev/srv/dev.html

the SocialNET project is a pretty large project for me, although I could continue but I would be leaving my IE7 users out...

-why cant everyone just use Firefox!

[Apostropartheid]

Because some people want to use IE7 *glares*

I suggest you read up on semantic markup and the advantages of, well, not using tables. effpeetee has quite a few good ones in particular.

You also have so many markup errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ronaldarichardson.com%2Fsocialnet%2Fdev%2Fsrv%2Fdev.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)--it's no wonder IE's not rendering right.

IE7/Vista shows structure, but some of it is a bit wonky. Exactly what problems are you experiencing?

This (http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/) is a very good presentation on tables

[ronmars]

I will look into this, I've always used tables. I'm all self taught so, I guess I'm going to have to learn some new stuff to get it working, thanks. I'm going to use this and see what happens.

[ronmars]

I'm going to give div a try instead of tables, this should be easier and work with IE7 and Firefox despite the many markup errors(-minor errors by me, i usually do those purposely so I don't get lost in code when I save and take breaks, I will be able to identify were I left off at.), thanks once more. I will never use tables again, unless I absolutely have too. I always thought that they were to build structure with, I guess not.

[VIPStephan]

Tables are good for structure. They are good and were invented to structure tabular data. It’s all about semantics (http://boagworld.com/archives/2005/11/semantic_code_what_why_how.html). Here’s a good source about accessible tables (http://ferg.org/section508/accessible_tables.html) and how tey are used in a correct way.

They are not made to create page layouts. But they are still allowed and you shouldn’t do the mistake and try to replace tables with divs by all means (i.e. when tables would actually be correct to use). Website development is not all about using divs instead of/rather than tables, it’s all about writing semantic code.

[ronmars]

Well, I did put in div tags instead of tables and I'm still unsatisfied. I also did fix a lot of the markup errors.

Heres what i have: http://www.ronaldarichardson.com/socialnet/dev/srv/newlayout.html

It still doesn't work on IE, I'm starting to think it may have something to do witht he dbx CSS. I didn't write that, it's from "Docking boxes (dbx) by Brothercake - http://www.brothercake.com/"

I really want a structured basic simple layout with the DBX before I start going on adding "script.aculo.us, jQuery" and all that other stuff.

--- So what would be the absolute correct way to build a structure CSS layout setup with:

||||header||||
-----nav------
|s1||side2||s3|
----footer-----

[VIPStephan]

http://bonrouge.com/3c-hf-fixed.php

[ronmars]

oh shizz.... thanks a lot, I'm going to use this now. -Fluid though, seems to work. nice!