I have been having trouble with DIV tags in Mozilla. I use Mozilla Firefox 0.8 for Windows. I don’t have any examples right now, but I test the same page in IE 6.0 and it looks fine.
I have two div tags side-by-side. They each say float: left. The left one is shorter than the right one but I don’t want to limit the lengths of either one. The right one says float: left and clear: right. This way, if the contents of it are longer than the left column, it stays seperated into columns. However, what happens is if I put a p tag with a sentence in it, for example, and the text is just slightly longer than the space provided, I expected it to wrap the text, which it does in IE. However, in Mozilla, it moves the entire div tag under the left div tag instead of to the right of it. Then, if it still doesn’t fit, it wraps it anyways.
I don’t know if I explained this too well, but if anyone gets what I am saying, and if you know how to fix that, please let me know. Thanks.
I have no trouble with DIV tags under Mozilla Firefox. (My website is http://texan.homeunix.net. It’s almost entirely DIV tags.) How are you giving it those parameters? CSS? IE is fairly “I’ll figure out what they meant” while Mozilla is more “That doesn’t work; I’ll ignore it.” Maybe whatever you’re doing it isn’t completely correct HTML…
==EDIT==
Could you get the actual code you’re using? That would help.
I don’t have code right now to post, but we just tried putting it in a table and that fixed it. I was trying not to use tables, which brings up another question. Someone told me that tables are no longer supported by web standards. Is this true? I rather use div tags, but tables work the same in most browsers, unlike div tags.
Just by looking at arbitrary webpages, you wouldn’t know it, but tables are supposed to be in decline. I believe they are deprecated (other methods, like DIV, are preferred over them) in current standards and will be eliminated from standards eventually. If you want some real in depth info, check the official docs: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.1
Tables have never been designed for positioning items on a page, and thus are deprecated for that. Tables are designed for organizing information, and are not deprecated for that use.
Just like you don’t type a letter in excel, you shouldn’t position things with a table.
There’s no such thing as “no longer supported by web standards,” but the use of tables in a presentational context is deprecated by the community, and is of course misusing a medium for representing tabular data. Often tables are easier to use, but are of course only useful if you intend for your pages to only ever be readable by specific types of browsers on PCs. They destroy the idea of browsing the web from anything other than a PC, and incidentally are slow to render and even slower to load comparatively. That said, table-based layouts will still validate and render as you’d expect in mainstream browsers under typical doctypes. They’ll just be perpetually a tad silly. If you’re still interested, I’m fairly certain I could fix your problem without the use of tables if you post the source code.
As for div tags, max, they aren’t much better. Overuse of divs and spans (which are theoretically for defining divisions not addressed by othe HTML elements) results in semantic nonsense and presentational HTML. The table will be in HTML for the forseeable future, but is simply meant for tabular data, and not as a structural device.
I understand the whole content vs presentation thing, I guess I should have wrote about that in my post.
Jonathan, I’m not sure what you mean by “overuse” of divs and spans. What is overuse? Obviously don’t make a page more complicated than you need to display how you want it to, but, if I’m not mistaken, divs and spans are what you are intended to use for positioning in a webpage. Use them (in your CSS, of course) till you get the appearance you like. Correct?
Well, what happens in some cases (and I’m a little bit guilty of this on my team’s site) is web authors use divs just to change styles in specific areas, for example to change the font of some selection of text, or to position a paragraph just right when they could have styled another element. Semantically, this is incorrect, as simply enclosing some text in a div and id’ing the div doesn’t always mean anything, and is often just an easier way of achieving a look. The way I justify doing that is if the task is impossible, or silly to do “properly”, I’ll just use a div or span. These are minor infractions.
The true *overuse* of spans and divs occurs when webdesigners try such presentational things as try to nest them within each other to get rounded corners as background-images for example. Sometimes, instead of defining a paragraph as display: block, they'll enclose it in a div which is by default block-level (which means, basically, it's shaped like a block and doesn't flow around other elements like text does). Sometimes they'll use CSS selectors to define rules around any span in an element
wait, what ive been reading about html and css, the problem in most pages is the fact that they use tags like <large>, <big>, etc over and over agian instead of just using css. as i understand it, html should just be used for simple content and css should be used for the actual styling of the page.
Errr, using <large>, <strong> etc, is fine. In fact, it would be incorrect to use CSS for such a use. You shouldn’t create some sorta span to just to **bold **this word or to italicize this one. The articles you are reading are probably referring to pages where all <p> or all <h1> are additionally <strong> or <large> modified. If you want to bold your headers or your text, do that in CSS.
Another thing you might have read is about <strong> vs <b>. Any html tags that just specify the appearance of something like <b> (bold) or <i> (italicize) should be replaced with tags taht have more semantic meaning like <strong> and <em>. They will appear the same (at least in most mainstream browsers), but will also be usable on all sorts of displays. For example, if it is some sort of html-to-speech browser, you might drop <b> assuming they are just appearance tweaks, but you wouldn’t drop <strong> (you might have the broswer read the word with emphasis…errr… that <em> but close enough).
(the <large> tag probably falls under html tags like <b> and <i> that are deprecated because I can’t think of any english semantic for it other than “display larger”)
Absolutely right, max. Though I should note, I started a trend when I wrote that last sentence. It’s a <big> tag, not a <large> tag. AFAIK, <large> doesn’t exist.
I think that it is still up to web designers to decide whether they want to use all CSS or use some html tags. I also agree that in the situation of a technical paper or any kind of article-type writing, strong and em tags should be used. I think that if you are setting any other CSS properties for the text, then use CSS, otherwise, use the html tags, except for technical papers or whatever where you would always use strong and em so that programs like Jaws, which reads the screen out loud, realizes that it is more important. I realized this when making a website for an organization for the blind and visually handicapped. That is how I did it.
Jonathan Lall and I explained it earlier in the post. HTML is simply not intended to be used for controlling the display of content. <b> has no meaning other than bold. What does bold mean to a blind person? Nothing. It isn’t really a noticeable change on the designeers side, but for people not using desktop browsers, it is a noticeable change. Now that I think about it, another benefit will likely be better search engines…
this is just what i read, (i dont do much web creation myself, i just like to know how to), but instead of using something like <strong></strong> tags, you should use a <div style=“font-weight:bold”></div>.
THey are considered not “general” enough. THe W3C is trying to make it so that the same message will be communicated no matter how the web page is accessed; phone, modern graphical browser, reader (IE for blind), text browser, etc.
I’m not sure about Italics and Bold tags, I still use them (sparingly).
I wish I had seen this thread earlier, as I would have joined the “tables aren’t for tabular data” camp.
Plus I don’t get the whole deal about “divs not rendering as easily as tables”. My website uses all div’s (Austin.homeunix.net) and it renders consistently in Moz. and IE.
Personally it’s much easier for me to use Divisions as opposed to tables. Plus divs integerate better with Style Sheets. (At least it seems that way to me…)
Had to put my two cents in. :rolleyes:
That would help.
