[thelist] CSS again: suspected IE funkiness on inline UL

[Joel D Canfield]

> I am unable to recreate the bottom border issue on IE6 or 
> IE7,

you're saying that when you look at the site in IE7, the orange tabs
have a blue bottom border, but the 'current' tab is white, flowing into
the body below?

> but the top
> border can be revealed by removing the float: left and width 
> 100% from the #header style.

not for me. I've set it that way now, and the only effect is that now
the grey background of the header is limited to the space behind the
navigation. top border is still missing in IE7, in my live page and the
meyertab.asp example.

> In my recreation, the nav spanned 100% without specifying and 
> corrected the
> background color from appearing below the nav bar. Come to 
> think of it,
> maybe it is the background color showing through to make it 
> appear like a
> 1px solid bottom border.

since there's no background anywhere specified of that dark blue, I
don't see how that's possible.

While I certainly don't wish to seem unappreciative of the many people
here who've taken time (sometimes quite a bit) to look at this and come
up with ideas, in the end, it really seems like we're all guessing.

Is CSS really this complicated? I mean, I'm new at this kind of thing,
so I'm not entirely surprised that I'm not finding the problem. But when
I've clearly identified that the problem is *not* the navigation code,
which works *perfectly* in the source page, but when copied *verbatim*
to my page, breaks - well, it seems like everyone is trying to solve the
wrong problem, or just plain guessing.

Again, I'm just trying to get my head around the big picture: is CSS
really a matter of guessing, twiddling, and voodoo? I do understand that
IE is a massive PITA and that, sometimes, the rules don't apply. But can
it really be this random?

I hope you'll pardon my frustration; some of its source is purely
personal; my wife has spent much of this year in hospital, was, for some
time, near death, and had what we hope was a final operation today,
resulting in a couple years of convalescence, and an eventual return to
nearly complete health. I haven't been able to look for a regular job
since the company I used to work for closed down, since I'm needed here
at home to help care for our two-year-old, so my only hope of making a
living is to apply the web skills I thought I had. Yet, at every turn,
it seems like they're rudimentary at best; not a huge lift to the
spirits when you've pinned all your hopes for providing for your family
on what turns out to be a deep and abiding mediocrity.

joel