[thelist] Hotmail problems

[James Aylard]

Hershel,

> Hotmail, however, is problematic.  They don't recognize the fact that the
> margin-top is a negative value and the text appears below the image.
(Last
> time I tested with them, I wasn't using margin-left and margin-right so
I'm
> not sure if these were displayed properly or not.)  I wrote them about
this
> problem, but would you believe, they didn't respond!

    Maybe I'm missing something, but why don't you simply make the image a
true background-image for a block element, such as a <div> or even the <p>
itself, and place the text within it? And why not use CSS to then center
that image in the block? E.g.:

<p style="background: url(img.jpg) no-repeat fixed center ;">

    That way, you avoid all of the negative margin settings altogether. If
you must, for some reason, still use your current approach, I suggest that
you tighten up your CSS by using the shorthand margin property, like so:

STYLE="margin: $textheight $marginright 0px $marginleft ;"

    As you can see, I rearranged the order of the values (top, right,
bottom, left), and plopped in a 0px value for the bottom margin. Also, you
should be using a unit of measurement (px) on each of these values; that's
the standard, and IE 6 won't allow length values without a unit of measure
when in standards-compliance mode.
    Why your current approach doesn't work in Hotmail, I can't say, since I
assume it relies completely on IE for rendering.

James Aylard