[thelist] Firefox Problem

[Hershel Robinson]

David,


> http://www.ahavaschesed.net/AnotherTest.html
> 
> If someone can view it in Explorer and Firefox, I
> would appreciate any ideas on how to get the latter to
> display it more like Explorer does (at least getting
> the middle and right sections higher without lowering
> the left one AND without making Explorer show it
> worse).

Well, the HTML here is what is sometimes referred to as 'tag soup' 
meaning that it is not organized in an easily-understood fashion and 
that not all tags are closed correctly. Furthermore, this page is built 
with nested <tables> and uses an imagemap, two technologies which can be 
difficult to work with.

The general thrust in web development today is to try to separate 
information from presentation, meaning to separate the information being 
presented, i.e. the words and images, from the actual layout on a 
person's screen (or whatever device he is using).

To be honest, the code here is quite a mess and I would first suggest 
that you obtain a simple CSS-based-layout template and then put your 
HTML data into it (each section into the correct section of the HTML 
template) without using tables for layout. I would venture to say 
(without hesitation) that while there will be a learning curve, in the 
end, this method will save you a lot of development time and headaches 
along the way.

For links and ideas about CSS-layout, see here:
http://csszengarden.com/

 From there (and from this list) you can find another few hundred sites 
with more information and tutorials.

The list of links along the left, for example, could be represented much 
more easily by a simple HTML unordered list. They would then be 
accessible to more visitors and they could styled any way you want via 
appropriate CSS and they would be easily extensible (or reduced). See 
here for examples:

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/

Overall, seeing as this appears to be a complete rewrite of your 
existing site, I would strongly suggest you consider making the 
investment in doing it correctly initially.

Feel free to contact me off-list.

All the best,
Hershel Robinson
Tsfat, Israel