If you use Firefox, you will notice that the header on the blog, written in .net, looks odd, as if the graphics are being bumped around by the search box. It is the same header and same code used on the front page, also written in .net, where it looks just fine. If anyone can solve the mystery, write me.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/2799/help-us-fix-our-goofy-blog-header-in-firefox/
Help us fix our goofy blog header in Firefox
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apple’s safari, which uses the khtml rendering engine, displays the same problem. offhand i would guess it has to do with the rendered size of the search bar widget.
-z
I think it has something to do with the size that users scale text up to. In FireFox and other gecko-based browsers, you can normally scale the font up as large as you want. However, this will result in misaligned graphics at times.
I am using Firefox and I do not see the misalignment of the header you speak of. However, once source of problem may be the space around the input box in the third TD of the top table – I have found that some rendering engines take spaces before and after certain elements in a TD very seriously, which can blow up a design. I would take out the spaces before and after any elements in TD tags and see if that fixes the problem.
firefox itself has a “web developer” plugin which exposes the problem clearly.
Turning on image dimensions…
On mine, the three left sections don’t align with the picture of a person on the right (a young mises?)
The picture is 60×77, but on the top, the left pieceis 21 (LvMI), and the middle (search) is 22 pixels high, the vertically-middle sections are 21 pixels high, and the bottom strip is 33 or 17 pixels high
33+22+21 is not equal to 60. If you just do a view source, you can see all these very unequal sizes.
In effect, you have a mosaic of unequal sized tiles, and Firefox is rendering them to the size you told it to.
I’ve seen two different “non-IE” ways – it can either scale the image to fill the shape (so a circle plotted into a 2×1 rectangluar area will become an ellipse), or it can scale a big area into a small one (a 2×2 box with a circle becomes a centered 1×1 box in a 2×1 rectangle with margins).
There is no IETF or WC3 “standard” way of fitting 5 pounds of pixels into a 3 pound box. Nor should there be. If frontpage outputs contradictory or erroneous HTML, you can’t expect it to be interpreted correctly, even in IE itself.
But in short, show source, and simple addition would show you the problem.
Gary North says that Microsoft supports its software so you should be able to just call them and have them change .net or front page to fix this so everything will be correct.
When I do open it in IE, I get a “Runtime Error” line 95 box every few seconds and I can’t stop it long enough to try seeing if anything else is different.
(Another firefox webdeveloper setting turns on table borders, and you can see how/why it looks as it does).
Changing the doctype declaration on the blog page to the one on the main page fixes the issue.
From what I can tell the problem is being caused by the document definition file (DTD) reference in the doctype tag. The Blog page uses an XHTML 1.1 DTD, which the main page uses XHTML 1.0. That explains why the header displays correctly on the main page and not on the Blog page.
The problem is not attributable to VB.NET, since that program does not automatically choose which DTD a page uses.
This isn’t the the first time I’ve seen a page that displays fine in Internet Explorer but not in Netscape or Firefox because of some obscure reason.
Ben Osborne and Garrett Baker win the prize for their simultaneous discovery of the problem, which of course means that they must share the prize winnings. They will both be invited to the award ceremony. Thanks so much for the help!
Try switching to a combination of java servlets, java server faces, jsp, and Jakarta’s Struts.
Seems to me people should just switch to Internet Explorer. In a competitive marketplace, there’s no need to help out stragglers like Netscape and Mozilla, especially when they’ve eschewed Free Market principles the way they have. This will either create the incentive needed for Netscape to keep up to date or it will cull the herd of browsers, thereby reducing costs associated with maintaining multiple browsers in IT departments and reducing waste by webmasters associated with special support for different browsers.
Seems like a win-win scenario. Mozilla/Netscape needs to keep its own house in order.
Seems to me that Mozilla and the re-emergence of Netscape (along with Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) are the only things keeping the browser market from complete atrophy.
Molly, any competent web designer will tell you that IE is what’s holding the Web back. It’s horribly incompatible with the actual web standards, as are Microsoft’s .Net developer tools. I typically spend half my time coding a site that automatically works beautifully in all standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, Konqueror), and then the other half fixing the IE bugs.
Really, if this is a conversation about saying what people should do, then I say everyone should switch *from* IE to the standards-compliant browser of their choice. Thankfully, the proliferation of new browsers, even if their users are in the minority, forces designers to create good, compliant code.
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