Extra breaks

[paradox8]

Allo. :)

If you would look at my blog, http://paradox.efx2.com using Firefox, there are huge breaks between the blog posts and also between the links in the linkages menu. Any idea what the problem is?

And also, can anybody tell me why my blog looks fine in Firefox but horrible in Internet Explorer? Has it something to do with the coding? Then again, the extra breaks are gone in I.E. I find it totally odd.

I appreciate any help I can get. :)

[Bill Posters]

First thing to do would be to get the markup and CSS valid.
FF, being a sensitive soul, is happy to do what it's told, so long as what you're telling it makes sense (read: is well-formed and valid).

It's likely that fixing the errors will fix your problem, quite possibly in both browsers.


For future reference, your first stop when debugging a page or site should the the markup (http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html) and CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) validators.
They will help highlight any errors in your code which you may have missed.
In today's increasingly compliant browser market, code errors are increasingly likely the be the source of layout problems.

Use the validators as a fresh set of eyes.
Using the validators to find outstanding errors should be the first thing you do - before you turn to others for a helping hand. :)

[ronaldb66]

Even if it does validate--I haven't tried--it's full of cr... not so very good markup. Removing the ju... less favorable presentational things like changing classed font elements to headings, the page can be reduced in size considerably and the document structure would be far more evident--which is hardly the case at the moment--making it far easier to spot errors like the one you reported.
Also, there is a style block somewhere in the middle of the markup, which is just plain wrong; styles should be in the head, nowhere else.

[paradox8]

Hmm, when I look at the errors, some don't seem to make any sense. I mean, I think they're correct but the validators are still saying they're wrong. It'll put up errors in tags like the use of / in http://... or end tags that are correct anyway.

Is it really just like that? How can I correct errors that are correct in the first place?

[VIPStephan]

It's not the slash that is primarily causing the eror but it's the missing double quote (") after the href=.

Also you have a lot of images which aren't closed properly. In XHTML all "stand-alone" elements like <br>, <img>, <meta> and stuff need to be self closing: <br />, <img />, <meta />.
Another thing is that height attributes don't work anyway and should be replaced using CSS (as should almost any attribute in the HTML).

Oh and there shouldn't be anything before the doctype (no character, no white space, no line break, etc.) because this is confusing IE and putting it into quirks mode which doesn't help displaying it correctly.