[thelist] Template Check (PM) with opinions and help with two problems, please.

[Pat Meeks]

Hi!

I'm redoing a component distribution site and have put together the main
template page for product info. Any opinions, suggestions, critiques and
comments are welcome.

The site must continue to serve Netscape 4x. It gets a much higher
percentage of 4x visitors (especially on Sun systems) than most sites and
some come in with JavaScript disabled (so I had to do some parts with tables
for layout).

Goals: Compatibility back to NS4; Quick loading; Easy, clear navigation;
Clean design; Good robot navigation for indexing.

The problems: (1) In trying to get the tables centered with left-aligned
text in IE6, Opera 6/7 makes the tables left-aligned. (2) The top margin
where the search box is and the top navigation varies widely between
browsers. I'm not looking for pixel perfect anything, but the differences
are quite dramatic. I've been trying margins, padding, etc. but when I fix
one browser, the other browser breaks.

Design: The client likes the colors and the simplicity. I'm worried it's
"too" plain. I'll revisit the idea of using CSS buttons every few months
when I see the NS4x users dropping even more.

The CSS has not been trimmed down and consolidated. I'll do that when the
site is finished. The html and CSS is fully commented and the page validates
to XHTML 1.0 transitional.

The page can be seen at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~measureone/template/data-tables-template.htma
Browsercam:
Browsercam can't take full screen captures (sob), so the best I could do was
to take hi-res captures to try and see how the data tables look. I have no
idea what is happening beneath the top of the first data table! I've checked
the pages in NS4.75, IE6.0, NS7.0 and Opera 7.11.
http://www.browsercam.com/view.aspx?proj_id=8501

Many thanks!

Pat (remove TODO)
pmeeksTODO at msn.com