Different browsers!

15 Nov 06 8:41 pm

You must of done something wrong. Actually I am going to take a wild guess and say you created everything from the "view" tab. Anotherwords, you didn't fine tune your page by looking at the code. You did your site from the design view. This will cause a shift in tables. I use dreamweaver for my sites and they show up the same in every browser. It is probably something small that you overlooked.

Adrian,

15 Nov 06 9:03 pm

You should try to check your sites in both internet explorer and firefox -- they do have their own quirks and interpretations. Without having a look at your site (perhaps you could show us?) I can't tell you what's gone wrong. To soften what Adrian said... it might not be anything glaringly obvious. One of the points in using a WYSIWYG editor is that you should be able to create it from the "view" tab. Unfortunately, because of the ways the different browsers interpret different things, a small thing that might not necessarily be "wrong" will completely throw your page into shambles.

For instance... if you've specified a width for something (like a table, table cell, div or something) and added some "padding" to it (to make things sit away from the edges), one of the browsers will add this "padding" size onto the already specified size of the box. So if it was a box with 250 width and 10 padding, it would make the whole width 270. (250 + 10 + 10). Whereas the other browser would say "Ok, the WHOLE width is 250. So you subtract the padding, making your actual content area 230.

That's just one example. There are lots of other weird things that often seem quite inexplicable. Maybe if you show us your site we can see what's happened?

Regards,
Mark

17 Nov 06 12:19 pm

After reading everyone’s comments and checking out a few FAQ's around the web. I decided my Code SUCKED! I didn’t know anything about web design or dreamweaver before I began so I guess crappy code was inevitable.

I've just finished an all nighter redesigning a new template page and now the code is much cleaner, it's really easy to add new content and it works in Firefox.

I've submitted my site to Mark to check it out, but with regards to putting my url on the forum I would like to keep my site private for the time being. Maybe when it's a little more polished I won't be so shy to put it up :oops:

Thanks all.

21 Nov 06 3:09 am

Hey Colin,

I'm going to respond to you here rather than by private message because it might help some other people. (Although I won't give away your URL if you're not ready to share yet.)

Your site isn't so bad! For a first website you're doing extremely well. Dreamweaver is a steep learning curve and to learn HTML to the point where you can avoid bugs right off the bat would take years of practice. You're using stylesheets pretty well, your page seems to be showing up pretty much the same in Firefox as IE (although I am using IE 6, not 7 like you are.), and it's looking pretty nice so far. Good work!

The only thing I can see immediately is that your file names contain spaces -- you should get rid of those, although it's hardly life-threatening. Just make things like "Article Page.html" into "Article_Page.html", "Article-Page.html" or "articlepage.html" and you'll be fine. Also consider not using capital letters in your file names -- again, it's convention.

Other than that, keep going! You're definitely on the right track. When you've gone as far as you can alone and you're ready to share your site with everyone else here, submit it in the "site critique" branch and I'll give you some more feedback.

Regards,
Mark

29 Dec 06 5:56 am

Hi Cdidcot,

I came across a free ebook that gives a simple intro into HTML code. If anyone is interesested, send me an email to [email protected], with "Basic HTML" in the subject line and I'll send you a copy (note - I didn't say use my website mail to bump up the figures - aren't I good :D )

Keep in mind that Firefox runs on both Windows and Linux. When MS Vista hits the streets the price of that and the new Office version scares folks and we could see a large surge in Linux users in the near future.

Your next most used Browser is Opera - available as a free download at www.opera.com Click on the basic Free download. It has a banner ad at the top on the free version. (A handy browser when you don't want to be a malware target).

Spaces in file names is a big no-no in webdesign and will perform differently from one browser to another. I use Studio 8 (Dreamweaver with all bells and whistles - the FOTBOAT edition) and have the training DVDs as well. They keep repeating that you should not use spaces in file names.

We do graphic design for Internet use (since 1999) - I design test with Firefox, then check using IE7, Opera, Netscape and Konqueror (Linux). I have never noticed any substantial difference between IE7 and Firefox views but often Opera and Netcape will show borders when none appear in Firefox/IE7 or joins where tiled backgrounds with texture overlap.